A data model for efficient address data representation - Lessons learnt from the Intiendo address matching tool
Abdullah Al Rahed, Serena Coetzee, Magnus Rademeyer · 2008
Geocoding refers to the process of assigning geographic identifiers and/or geographic coordinates to the description of a feature location, i.e. the words, codes or terms that describe a feature’s location. Address matching is the specific case of geocoding where the description of a feature location comprises an address. Address matching is complicated by an incomplete or inaccurate incoming address or one that contains a misleading geographic identifier in its location type hierarchy. The Intiendo address matching tool is based on a data structure that is similar to the hierarchy of location types described in ISO 19112, but we have made some novel extensions to enable a spatial adjacency search. Intiendo does not rely purely on the alphanumeric match in the location type hierarchy but incorporates spatial proximity into the address matching. We also describe how the Intiendo address matching process can be configured and fine tuned, for example, by assigning weights to the location types in the hierarchy, and by specifying parameters for the spatial adjacency match. In this paper we present the hierarchical data structures of the Intiendo address matching tool and show how they are an extended implementation of the ISO 19112 general model. We show the similarities between the Intiendo and ISO 19112 models, and present the extensions that were implemented in Intiendo. By way of examples, we show that our extended model allows more efficient and accurate address matching incorporating spatial adjacency and hierarchical fine tuning.