The Complexity of Mapping Physical to Geolocation Address
Individuals’ physical addresses are complicated structures, which we take for granted over time. The addresses in the US can have multiple elements which in themselves do not seem complicated. We can easily understand the elements of a physical address, such as street name and number, city name, state name, and zip code. While physical addresses are understandable to us, geolocation is something that we should rely on machines to analyze
Today, various industries use geolocation in their practices, including hospitality, government, banking, travel, and telecommunications industries. Geolocation is accessible to individuals outside of those industries, too. Think about the time when you went to a great movie theater and “checked in” using Facebook or Foursquare features to share your location with your friends and followers. Conversely, even when you search for a restaurant address using Google Maps, you essentially face geolocation.
Almost all websites use geolocation to obtain data about their users and their location. This helps them target specific audiences accordingly. The increasing popularity of geolocation usage across different spheres of business and technology requires accurate calculation of the geolocation of a certain physical address.
Let us consider two following addresses as an example:
- 31 ½ N. Mars Rd NE, Lot 1, City of Science, Moon, 00001.
- 31 N. Mars Rd NE, apt. 200, city of Science, Moon, 00001.
If some individual inputs “31 N. Mars Rd NE, City of Science, Moon, 00001” into a machine, it will process the entry and give ambiguous, wrong, not matching in range, or not calculated outcome.
You can notice the difference in how we see addresses and how machines process them by thinking of a situation in which a friend of yours decides to give you a gift using drone delivery. While your friend only thinks about surprising you instead of considering the address of delivery, geolocation, and so on, the drone considers this information first.
Drones are machines that need to have precise information on where to deliver the gift; otherwise, the present will get lost on the way and will not reach its addressee. However, if a gift was delivered by a postman, he or she would work on the problem and try to resolve it so that the present reaches its destination.
Ordinarily, the conversion of postal address into geolocation on the planet needs to be done carefully. Nevertheless, the ordinary geocoders that you can find on the web today are not precise as they consider the entire street address before the city name as one token, or as two tokens at most, while the actual address might have up to eight tokens, or columns, to aggregate to a complete address.
To solve this problem, every address token should be parsed separately, after which all tokens can be aggregated into a single entry. You can find a respectable geocoding tool for precise conversion of non-parsed addresses into geographical coordinates, Batch Geocoder CSV 2 Geodata at https://csv2geo.com
