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You know part of the address - but where exactly is it on a map? It's an ever-present challenge in marketing, just as it is in the physical world of logistics planning and real-time navigation. What's more, it is becoming even more pressing with the globalisation of trade and the growth of multinational marketing.
There are various well-established computer packages for finding addresses from postcodes, and others for geocoding addresses (in other words, giving them a grid reference so that they can be placed on a map). |
But such systems often do not cover non-UK addresses. In other countries, where postcoding is not always as detailed as it is in Britain, the established use of simple look-up tables between postcode and location is not helpful. Using standard UK-developed solutions, it may be difficult or impossible to plot the position of either private dwellings or businesses with any degree of accuracy.
The answer is now available in the form of a package called Universal Geocoder from Kingswood MapMechanics, the digital mapping and geographic information systems specialist. Not only can this geocode addresses in a variety of formats in many different countries; it can also do it extremely quickly.
Universal Geocoder is offered as an optional module with GeoConcept, the leading GIS, but is also available as a stand-alone product to geocode your data for use in other software systems. It is not limited to postcodes; it can also geocode locations on the basis of other criteria including town, street and individual house number.
Its ultimate accuracy depends on the amount of detail in the digital mapping that lies behind it. From its extensive experience of digital mapping, Kingswood MapMechanics has found the address range data in street-level mapping from Navigation Technologies to be ideal for geocoding. The company supplies the package with this or with other maps as required.
The NavTech Premium dataset includes address ranges, which allows Universal Geocoder to identify locations - combining various combinations of property number, street, town and postcode information as available. This means that even with UK postal addresses, it can often geocode locations more precisely than typical address-matching software.
On the Continent and in America, where postcode information or other aspects of the nomenclature may vary widely, the Universal GeoCoder is programmed to take account of different postcode systems, abbreviations, languages, naming conventions and so on.
Users can specify the degree of tolerance they will allow, and the system will report instances where the location of an address is in doubt. Users can then take advantage of an interactive mode, in which they intervene to make intelligent assumptions about the true position.
Not only does the Universal GeoCoder package handle a variety of address formats; it is also thought to be one of the fastest systems of its kind. It can read address data in many formats, either using simple text files or taking advantage of OLE or ODBC links with external databases.
To make Universal Geocoder as widely available as possible, Kingswood MapMechanics offers the package either by country or for the whole of Europe or America. |
