topic Re: Alternate City Names? in Data Management Questions

Alternate City Names?

DennisKopp — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 15:07:07 GMT

I am trying to work out a way to have ArcGIS only return full city names instead of abbreviated city names. For example, SAINT LOUIS instead of ST LOUIS, etc. Right now it is returning both, but our system only uses the full name, so if a user selects the abbreviated name, it causes issues.

I have done quite a bit of digging and found some places that talked about editing a .CLS file, I attempted this, but to no avail; I must have been doing something wrong because all of the edits I made to those files didn't take, it acted as if I had made no changes at all. I then found some information about alternate names tables, but I can't seem to get it to work for cities, only streets. Is it possible to use an alternate name table for cities? The information I could find about alternate name tables in general was very vague.

We are using the locators and street data that came with the street map data from ESRI.

Any help you could provide would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Re: Alternate City Names?

JoeBorgione — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 18:17:44 GMT

Dennis; typically alternate names tables are for streets or points that you are matching to. For example if a street is named E Elm St but is AKA 1st St you could enter an address as either 1234 E Elm St or 1234 1st St and get a hit. Or with point data you could have a Dennys on Main aka Dennys.

My guess is you are using a US streets with City type of locator, and the data you are matching to has both ST Lewis as well as SAINT LEWIS in the city field. The only way I know to fix that problem is to edit your data.

Hope this helps-

Re: Alternate City Names?

DennisKopp — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 19:27:18 GMT

Hi Joe,
Thanks for the help. I'm using the USA Geocoding locator that came built into the Arc software. As far as our data goes, i'm a little stumped, I understand what you are saying, but no matter which way I feed the info into Arc, I get the same results.

For example, if I open ArcMap and do a find on any address in St Louis, it returns a match on St Louis and Saint Louis. Alternatively, if I do a find on any address in Saint Louis, it returns a match on St Louis and Saint Louis. Because it is returning both results, I don't think editing the data will help me, I would assume there is some way within Arc to do this and I just don't know how :).

Re: Alternate City Names?

JoeBorgione — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 15:02:51 GMT

Hi Joe,
Thanks for the help. I'm using the USA Geocoding locator that came built into the Arc software. As far as our data goes, i'm a little stumped, I understand what you are saying, but no matter which way I feed the info into Arc, I get the same results.

For example, if I open ArcMap and do a find on any address in St Louis, it returns a match on St Louis and Saint Louis. Alternatively, if I do a find on any address in Saint Louis, it returns a match on St Louis and Saint Louis. Because it is returning both results, I don't think editing the data will help me, I would assume there is some way within Arc to do this and I just don't know how :).

So you get the same result, with the same score, but each one has the city spelled two different ways?

That seems like rather odd behavior; call me captain obvious, right?! :confused:

I don't know if I have that data set loaded on my machine, but I'll take a look...

Re: Alternate City Names?

MatthewOelschlegal — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 18:46:15 GMT

Dennis,

Since you are geocoding against the ArcGIS online data you are not able to change what is returned as possible matches. If you were able to build your own address locator to geocode against, you could fix this.

Matt