Help! Im using a complicated spreadsheet to locate addresses

[ChristiNelson]

Hi all,

Im new to Geocoding and I'm using ArcGIS10 (ArcInfo license).  I have a spread sheet of point locations, but some are listed by address and some by intersection.  Further, some of these addresses and intersections have spatial operators.  For example, the point is "32 feet North from 4300 McGlothen Way", or the point is "250 feet East from Snowden Ave @ Ganges Ct".

So, I have questions as to how to set up my excel table to properly represent this information, so that it will import correctly and geocode the points.  So far, my headings are:  SITE_NUM (which is an ID), FACILITIES (which is a name), ADDRESS, INTERSECTION, SPATIAL OPERATOR, CITY, STATE, ZIP

1. Should I have separate headings for Address and Intersection, or can I put an intersection in as an Address?

2. Is SPATIAL OPERATOR an acceptable field?  How do I populate it so that the address/intersection point location will be moved the correct amount of feet in the correct direction?  Right now each record looks similar to this: "250 feet East from Snowden Ave @ Ganges Ct".

3. To further complicate things, some of these point locations are just Place Names.  Do I need to create a separate spreadsheet and address locator for these?

Answers to any or all of these questions would be greatly apppreciated.  I thank you in advance for your time and much needed help.

Christi Nelson

[JoeBorgione]

Hi all,

Im new to Geocoding and I'm using ArcGIS10 (ArcInfo license).  I have a spread sheet of point locations, but some are listed by address and some by intersection.  Further, some of these addresses and intersections have spatial operators.  For example, the point is "32 feet North from 4300 McGlothen Way", or the point is "250 feet East from Snowden Ave @ Ganges Ct".

So, I have questions as to how to set up my excel table to properly represent this information, so that it will import correctly and geocode the points.  So far, my headings are:  SITE_NUM (which is an ID), FACILITIES (which is a name), ADDRESS, INTERSECTION, SPATIAL OPERATOR, CITY, STATE, ZIP

1. Should I have separate headings for Address and Intersection, or can I put an intersection in as an Address?

2. Is SPATIAL OPERATOR an acceptable field?  How do I populate it so that the address/intersection point location will be moved the correct amount of feet in the correct direction?  Right now each record looks similar to this: "250 feet East from Snowden Ave @ Ganges Ct".

3. To further complicate things, some of these point locations are just Place Names.  Do I need to create a separate spreadsheet and address locator for these?

Answers to any or all of these questions would be greatly apppreciated.  I thank you in advance for your time and much needed help.

Christi Nelson

First and foremost; if you are going to use excel, be sure you don't have any spaces or special characters in the field names.  For example, if you want to use Spatial Operator, rename it to Spatial_Operator or SpatialOperator or something along those lines.

As far as your specific questions:

1.  You can use the address or an intersection to geo-locate a point, so long as the address is standardized to the data you are matching against, AND, you use the proper symbol indicating an intersection; typically these include &, AND etc.

2. I would drop the the 'spatial operator' concept.  If you are geocoding against street centerline data, you results are interpolated anyway.  In other words you are going to introduce a certain amount of precision error.  Think about this; if a street has a range of 100-200 on the even side, and 101-199 on the odd side, any geocoding locator is going to interpolate the address 150 half way on the block and on the even side.  It may be that house 150 is at one end or the other.  If you require the level of precision that your 'spatial operator' implies, you'll need to find a more reliable method.

3.  Geocoding is a translator of sorts.  It takes something that us humans know, like 1234 S Main St and turns it into an X,Y coordinate pair that a GIS understands.  You can create a locator that works with Place Names, but you'll need to provide the X,Y for each.  A locator of that type matches against a point feature class where the X,Y of the Place Name is known.

Take a look at the online help for geocoding, starting here.


Hope this helps-