Need for a Geocoder Discussion

[ErinLesh1]

Do you have or foresee a need for a geocoder for Roads & Highways users? 

The idea is that the route network is considered the authoritative locationing system within an agency's GIS infrastructure, and without a geocoder, there is not a mechanism to transfer data from other siloed databases onto the route network.     

Please comment with your thoughts and any functionality you would like to see in addition to:

• Multiple methods to reference off of including
  • measure, milepost, intersections, stationing, polygon boundaries (i.e. county).
• Employ temporality
• Consume over a 1,000 records
• Consider route dominance for data placement
• Have a function to fix errors such as out of range or mis-typed route names

Esri partners - Do you have any geocoding tools to share with the RHUG community?

Thanks Patrick Whiteford‌ for pursing this functionality and creating most of this content.

[KyleGonterwitz]

Interesection gecoding was another beast that we are working hard to tame in Kansas.  Shawn Saving at KU DASC has been working with Esri to resolve many types of intersection geocoding issues and there have been many updates to the geocoding in new releases of pro.  There are unique challenges that the LRS is well suited to handle with geocoding, such as tie duplicate handling, east/west junctions there are many parths forward I am wondering which to take.  We are to the point with segmentation that we are talking about refactoring our approach and leveraging the LRS more for geocoding.  I suppose the approach in a nutshell is management of segments for traditional geocoding and management of intersection points and zones for intersection geocoding.

[KyleGonterwitz]

Shawn recently developed a geocoder based on the route concurrency table, so that concurrency route segments can be geocoded as intersections. We are also ironing out the process of maintianing GIS refposts in a hosted feature dataset (facilitating easy Collector/Quick Capture app access) and locating those features to the refpost control state LRM routes as events for geocoding and offsetting.  

here are the ingredients we use

ON_ROAD/Route  AT_ROAD/Milepost  OFFSET  DIRECTION

here is the formula:

1. Geocode ON/AT roads as intersections using esri geocoder

2.   Obtain Projected XY Coordinate

3.  Buffer the point in by offset distance

4. Intersect the buffer outline to the road centerline segments as points

5.  In SQL, query the matching ON road (standardized)  to the centerline segment road name.  CASE Select coordinate directions from DIRECTION (ie N, E, S, W, NE etc) and RANK the offset coordinates so that you are selecting the most "east" of the intersected points, or keep the intersection if it is the most east.

I'll try to find some actual SQL that does the offsetting.  With this method we can locate a few hundred thousand crash records in about a workday.