Geocoding

Geocoding is the computational process of transforming a physical address description to a location on the Earth's surface (spatial representation in numerical coordinates). Reverse geocoding, on the other hand, converts geographic coordinates to a description of a location, usually the name of a place or an addressable location. Geocoding relies on a computer representation of address points, the street / road network, together with postal and administrative boundaries. Geocoding is the computational process of transforming a physical address description to a location on the Earth's surface (spatial representation in numerical coordinates). Reverse geocoding, on the other hand, converts geographic coordinates to a description of a location, usually the name of a place or an addressable location. Geocoding relies on a computer representation of address points, the street / road network, together with postal and administrative boundaries. The geographic coordinates representing locations often vary greatly in positional accuracy. Examples include building centroids, land parcel centroids, interpolated locations based on thoroughfare ranges, street segments centroids, postal code centroids (e.g. ZIP codes, CEDEX), and Administrative division Centroids. Geocoding — a subset of Geographic Information System (GIS) spatial analysis — has been a subject of interest since the early 1960s. In 1960, the first operational GIS — named the Canada Geographic Information System (CGIS) — was invented by Dr. Roger Tomlinson, who has since been acknowledged as the father of GIS. The CGIS was used to store and analyze data collected for the Canada Land Inventory, which mapped information about agriculture, wildlife, and forestry at a scale of 1:50,000, in order to regulate land capability for rural Canada. However, the CGIS lasted until the 1990s and was never available commercially.