Canada Postal Codes in 10

JimW1

Does anyone know what locators the ArcGIS Online geocoder uses for Canada? I'm QA/QC'ing some vendor data and I'm 99% they are using the ArcGIS Online Version 10 geocoder. The results in Canada have some funky clustering happening where hundreds of postal codes are being cluster in one XY location - there is a spot in Alberta with over 2000 postal codes are being plotted at the end of a dirt road.

I've checked these points against the PCCF and they are indeed incorrectly placed by the ArcGIS Online geocoder - one group in Newfoundland has offsets of over 90km. You could use the City and Province fields and get a better return than the postal code attribute.

I am trying to get a sense of what is going on but most of the documentation is highly US focused. If anyone could point me in the right direction or share their wisdom it would be appreciated. I'm new to geocoding but not to ESRI.

Cheers.

JimW1

It sounds like those points hit on zip code centroids because they failed to make a match in the Roof Tops or Streets locators first, which would be ideal.

Locators: The North American Address Locator is a composite locator that references nine locators. Each attribute listed below is in one or more of these locators as defined for the attribute below. For example, if you use the ZIP attribute, it will only be returned for the US_Zip4 or US_Zipcode locators. A valid result will not be returned in the response unless the specific locator for an attribute was used in the request. The nine locators are:

US_RoofTop: Used for finding latitude and longitude of a U.S. building
US_Streets: Used for finding street addresses in the U.S. (e.g., 380 New York Street, Redlands, California)
US_ZIP4: Used for finding a U.S. ZIP+4 Code (e.g., 92373-8100)
US_Zipcode: Used for finding a U.S. ZIP Code (e.g., 92373)
US_CityState: Used for finding a U.S.city/state (e.g., Redlands, CA)
CAN_Streets: Used for finding street addresses in Canada (e.g., 12 Concorde Place, Toronto, Ontario)
CAN_StreetName: Used for finding a street name in Canada (Concorde Place, Toronto, Ontario)
CAN_Postcode: Used for finding a postal code in Canada (M3C 3R8)
CAN_CityProv: Used for finding a city/province in Canada (e.g., Calgary, Alberta)

http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisonline/content/index.html#/Using_standard_geocoding_tasks/011q0000000t000000/

Thanks Andrew. My first instinct was that it was geocoding to a FSA (Zip4 equiv?) centroid or central feature but it's not the case. For another project, I took the Canadian Postal codes down to the fourth character (FSALDU = A#A#A# - e.g. M5V down to M5V3) to find their central features and these are nowhere near where these clusters of oddly placed postal codes. There must be an underlying issue with the CAN_Postcode data accuracy. I have the actual postal code file from Canada Post so the error does not exist in the official postal code conversion file (PCCF). Looks like one of my vendors and ESRI are using some other source for their Canadian postal codes than the current PCCF.

Thankfully the dreadful points are mainly rural and in urban areas they are mostly okay.