ArcGIS Server in order to Geocode addresses?

[ReneePardee]

Hello,

I am trying to geocode addresses in ArcMap 10.1; when I try it gives me an error message ???The address locator is damaged, would you like to repair it? Access to this resource is forbidden, regardless of authorization???. I???ve spent several hours trying to troubleshoot the ???Access to this resource is forbidden, regardless of authorization??? part of that message. The other thread which mentions the issue talks about ArcGIS servers. Do you need ArcGIS servers in order to geocode addresses or is there another problem? I've never used this technique before, but it seems pretty straightforward.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

[ReneePardee]

Hello everyone,

Thanks for replying. I work for a college in New Mexico and I want to use addresses to create maps about our students. I need to geocode street addresses so we can visualize different patterns (dot density of different GPAs, etc). I eventually want to geocode for the whole country so we can see where all our students are coming from. Plus we have lots of online courses available, so it would be interesting to see where those students are.

I was trying to use the geocode built into ArcGIS, World Geocode Service, by right clicking on my table with regular street addresses. That's when the "Not Authorized" error occurred. I called ESRI and they told me that this service is no longer available for free, that you have to either make your own geocode or pay for the geocoding services through their new credit system.

After this I tried to create my own geocoder but the data I downloaded off the USDA website only had the street name available, none of the other attribute fields are useful for geocoding. This data didn't work of course because my addresses have the number before the street name. If it had worked I would just download all the other states, but there is no house number range in the attribute table.

Also, my excel table with the student addresses needs formatting. Is SAS a good way to format tables for geocoding? I need to remove the students from the table with null values for their address and some students have the 4digit extension attached to their zip code. I started to go through the data manually, before deciding that was an absolutely ridiculous idea since we have thousands of students.

I'm a beginner at SAS, so any advice about using SAS to create data for ArcGIS would be very helpful.

Thank you,

Renee

[JoeBorgione]

Ahhh... the old AGOL pay to play thing.....

With respect to you  SAS question, any database is probably better than Excel for this type of manipulation.  I like excel....  to invoice my clients and submit my earnings to my tax guy.  You can import your excel worksheet(s) into a file geodatabse and then essentially have it in the ArcGIS native database format.  I'm not familiar with SAS and importing it to or connecting from ArcGIS.

Before you start formatting your address list, you may want to concentrate on obtaining some street data you can actually match against.  If you format your addresses before you get something to match against, you run the risk of have to re-format them so they'll work with your matching data.  Take a look here:  New Mexico Resource Geographic Information Systems‌.

[ReneePardee]

Thanks Joe! Which data do you usually use to geocode? I've looked through the transportation and census metadata and could not find any file with street names, number ranges, etc. in-order to do street level geocoding. Is there a better section to look in?

[JoeBorgione]

At the moment I geocode against streets.  However, I'll be using address points soon.  I don't use anything in NM, I just googled NM GIS and found the website.

I just downloaded the E911 roads for Bernalillo County, and they have names and address ranges.  If you need national data, there is some that ships with the ESRI software discs, or Census has them by state (I think).

[AgathaWong]

ArcGIS for Desktop ships with the complete Data & Maps collection on DVD. It provides the North America locators that you can use for geocoding. Please keep in mind that the locators were built with different and older datasets as compared with ArcGIS Online. While the ArcGIS Online World geocode service offers the better quality, using the locators in the Data & Maps DVD can be a good start. On the ArcGIS Desktop help, there is a book called Datasets provided with ArcGIS under Geodata. It provides you detailed information of the data.

[ReneePardee]

Joe, thanks for checking. I just checked the E911 roads for my county and they are missing roads... but I will keep looking! The missing roads could be from growth, I can't remember how much we've grown since 2009.

Agatha, thank you for mentioning this. I knew I should have this data available. The problem is that I wasn't permitted to install ArcGIS myself, the computer support folks had to do it (can't step on another departments' toes!) and I wasn't in my office when they did. I sent them an e-mail, so hopefully they will be able to find the maps & data collection DVD.

[ReneePardee]

I now have ESRI Data & Maps on my computer. I attempted to geocode and over half my fields were geocoded! It was a miracle. So I used the next set of of data I prepared for geocoding and tried again, this produced 60% match. I realized I'd filtered out many addresses in SAS, took that portion of code out and geocoded again. There are around 7000 records, verses 2200 in the first attempt, and now it now won't geocode. The process moved pretty quickly, so I don't understand how the exact same method of preparing data, but with more records would stall out the process. Nothing else is running on my computer except firefox.

Any Ideas?

Also, what dies 'tied' mean?

[IanMurray]

tied merely means that two address get the same score in matching(usually when a road name has different suffixs, or names i.e. US 72 N vs US 72 S for the same address, or US 72 N vs US 72, etc).  When tied you can manually pick a match between the tied records.

[JeffRogers]

Renee, tied means that there are two or more equal candidates for an address.  In Los Angeles for example there is one city name "Los Angeles" and within this city there may be 50 postal codes.  If you provide an address such as 123 Figueroa St Los Angeles, there may be 10, 123 Figueroa St in Los Angeles but each of these could be in a different postal code.  When a address includes less than all the information required to uniquely identify it, it may match to more than one candidate address.  We call this situation a tie.

[ReneePardee]

Thanks for the answers. If ever there was a fickle mistress, it is ArcGIS. Today I had a 54% match on my group of 7000 addresses, and an almost complete match if I use just zipcodes. Now I just need to figure out how to meld them together.