Table 2 Geocoding system operational capabilities metrics
From: An evaluation framework for comparing geocoding systems
Category and notes | Metric | Description and/or example |
|---|---|---|
System Flexibility | User defined reference layers | Is it possible to use any available reference data |
Ability of the user of the system to make changes and additions to data sources and methods used by the system | Specialized address parsing | Add in support for new street types, named places |
Specialized matching algorithms | Consider neighboring areas for matches | |
Customized feature hierarchies | Hierarchy based on organizational policy | |
System Integration | Operating system support | Windows, Unix/Linux/Solaris |
Ability to merge a geocoding system into an existing production system | System/Workflow Integration | Into tools and systems used by the organization (eg SAS wrappers) |
Varying operational modes | Batch/interactive/manual | |
Desktop Version | Standalone product for highly sensitive data | |
In-house Server Version | Internal server for multiple users within agency firewall | |
API Version | Vendor or custom-written code for off-site processing | |
Metadata | Spatial confidence values | Descriptions of the region size (geographic area) that a geocode output is known to fall within |
Types and level of detail reported about the quality of the output data and/or the characteristics of the geocoding system | Input address/matched address concordance | Descriptions of which attributes of the input address were incorrect, incomplete, partially matched or not used in the matching process |
Capabilities | Automatic batch geocoding | The ability to process a data file of records using a single process |
Baseline functionality of paramount importance to agencies working with large health data sets | Interactive review | The ability to perform manual review for non-matched records to attempt to determine a correct output geocode |
Alias tables | The ability to incorporate tables of named places, common synonyms for street address attributes | |
Weighted centroids | The ability to bias the output location of a geocode based a known distribution of a characteristic of interest such as the distribution of population or specific subsets of a population in an area |