Geocoding is the process of assigning a location, usually in the form of coordinate values, to an address by comparing the descriptive location elements in the address to those present in the reference material. Addresses come in many forms, ranging from the common address format of house number followed by the street name and succeeding information to other location descriptions such as postal zone or census tract. In essence, an address includes any type of information that distinguishes a place.
Many common tasks are related to the geocoding process, such as creating and maintaining address locators, geocoding addresses, and getting addresses for point locations. The Geocoding toolbox contains tools to assist in accomplishing these tasks.
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
Creates an address locator. The address locator can be used to find a location of an address, geocode a table of addresses, or get the address of a point location. | |
Creates a composite address locator. A composite address locator consists of two or more individual address locators that allow addresses to be matched against the multiple address locators. | |
Geocodes a table of addresses. This process requires a table that stores the addresses you want to geocode and an address locator or a composite address locator. This tool matches the addresses against the address locator and saves the result for each input record in a new point feature class. When using the ArcGIS World Geocoding Service, this operation may consume credits. | |
Rebuilds an address locator to update the locator with the current reference data. Since an address locator contains a snapshot of the reference data when it was created, it will not geocode addresses against the updated data when the geometry and attributes of the reference data are changed. To geocode addresses against the current version of the reference data, the address locator must be rebuilt if you want to update the changes in the locator. | |
Rematches addresses in a geocoded feature class. | |
Creates addresses from point locations in a feature class. The reverse geocoding process searches for the nearest address or intersection for the point location based on the specified search distance. When using the ArcGIS World Geocoding Service, this operation may consume credits. | |
Standardizes the address information in a table or feature class. |
Two tools for packaging locators are available in the Package toolset in the Data Management toolbox.
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
Consolidate a locator or composite locator by copying all locators into a single folder. | |
Package a locator or composite locator to create a single compressed .gcpk file. |