Geocoding of Canadian Locations

[VitalyLivshits]

We are starting to use the geocoding functionality in ArcGIS Maps for Power BI to geocode Canadian Dissemination Areas (DAs) and find this feature to be very useful.

To provide some background, Canadian DA versions correspond to Federal census years. The 2 most recent years are 2011 and 2016. Most DA identifiers remained the same from 2011 to 2016. According to our rough count, 31 DAs were added to Toronto area in 2016.

We've plotted 2011 Toronto area DAs with ArcGIS Maps for Power BI and all of them geocoded successfully. However, when plotting 2016 Toronto area DAs, all 31 new DAs failed to geocode and we got the "failed to locate 31 features" error from ArcGIS Maps for Power BI.

Questions:

1) Does the Esri geocoding service indeed use 2011 Canadian dataset to geocode DAs?

2) Is the same dataset also used to geocode all other Canadian location types, such as CSDs?

3) Assuming #1, are there plans to upgrade the geocoding dataset to 2016 data? If so, at what time?

Thanks!

[ScottBall]

Hi Vitaly - to answer your questions:

1. Yes, our boundary data for Canada is based of the 2011 census.
2. Yes - all of our Canadian boundary data is of the same vintage.
3. We do plan to update to the 2016 boundaries. It's my understanding some of this data is still being released by Statistics Canada. After it's all been released, our data vendor will get us the information in early 2018, we will process it and tentatively plan to release it in 2018. 

[VitalyLivshits]

Hi Scott Ball,

To follow up on a related item, we often plot data sets that have a few locations which fail to geocode. For example, 10 out of 500 features may fail to geocode. In such scenarios, the Esri visualization shows the number of features that failed to geocode. However, we cannot find a way to find out the specific locations behind that aggregate.

Is there a way to extract an exception report that would list the locations that failed to geocode? If there there is currently no way to do so, can a mechanism please be added in a future release? This is very important for troubleshooting purposes.

Thanks!

[ScottBall]

Hey Vitaly - yes, that's been on our radar for a little while now. We would like to expose that information to the user to help you track down troublesome records and do data cleanup. I don't have a timeline for you but it is something we've discussed and want to do.

[VitalyLivshits]

Hi SBall-esristaff,

I am just wondering if you have a more definitive timeline to share around #3. Our users are quite eagerly awaiting 2016 geocoding. My understanding is that Stats Can has already released all the relevant data.

Thanks!

[VitalyLivshits]

Hi Scott,

Is it possible to add Dissemination Blocks (DBs) to the location type dropdown for geocoding in Power BI?

Thanks!

[VitalyLivshits]

SBall-esristaff‌, can you please provide feedback on this one? Thanks.

[ScottBall]

Hey Vitaly - I don't have any more current information than what is in my initial response. Our vendor will provide the updated info to us in early 2018 and we will need to process and validate the data. We will have it in our services later in 2018.