A Geocoding Best Practices Guide

The advent of geographic information science and the accompanying technologies (geo-graphic information systems, global positioning systems, remote sensing, and more recently location-based services) have forever changed the ways in which people conceive of and navigate planet Earth. Geocoding is a key bridge linking the old and the new — a world in which streets and street addresses served as the primary location identifiers and the modern world in which more precise representations are possible and needed to explore, analyze, and visualize geographic patterns, their drivers, and their consequences. Geocoding, viewed from this perspective, brings together the knowledge and work of the geographer and the computer scientist. The author, Daniel Goldberg, has done an excellent job in laying out the fundamentals of geocoding as a process using the best contributions from both of these once-disparate fields. This book will serve as a rich reference manual for those who want to inject more science and less art (uncertainty) into their geocoding tasks. This is particularly important for medical geography and epidemiology applications, as recent research findings point to environmental conditions that may contribute to and/or exacerbate health problems that vary over distances of hundreds and even tens of meters (i.e., as happens with proximity to free-ways). These findings call for much better and more deliberate geocoding practices than many practitioners have used to date and bring the contents of this best practices manual to the fore. This book provides a long overdue summary of the state-of-the-art of geocoding and will be essential reading for those that wish and/or need to generate detailed and accurate geographic positions from street addresses and the like.