Geocoding is the process of assigning a location, usually in the form of coordinate values, to an address by comparing the descriptive location elements in the address to those present in the reference material. Addresses come in many forms, ranging from the common address format of house number followed by the street name and succeeding information to other location descriptions such as postal zone or census tract. In essence, an address includes any type of information that distinguishes a place.
Many common tasks are related to the geocoding process, such as creating and maintaining address locators, geocoding addresses, and getting addresses for point locations. The Geocoding toolbox contains tools to assist in accomplishing these tasks.
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
Geocodes a table of addresses. This process requires a table that stores the addresses you want to geocode and an address locator or a composite address locator. This tool matches the stored addresses against the locator and saves the result for each input record in a new point feature class. When using the ArcGIS World Geocoding Service, this operation may consume credits. | |
Creates addresses from point locations in a feature class. The reverse geocoding process searches for the nearest address, place, or intersection for the point location based on optimized distance values for locators created with the Create Locator tool. |
Two tools for packaging locators are available in the Package toolset in the Data Management toolbox.
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
Consolidate a locator or composite locator by copying all locators into a single folder. | |
Package a locator or composite locator to create a single compressed .gcpk file. |