McDonald Yolanda J, Schwind Michael, Goldberg Daniel W, Lampley Amanda, Wheeler Cosette M
Department of Geography, College of Geosciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX.
Geospat Health. 2017 May 11;12(1):526. doi: 10.4081/gh.2017.526.
Geocoding is the science and process of assigning geographical coordinates (i.e. latitude, longitude) to a postal address. The quality of the geocode can vary dramatically depending on several variables, including incorrect input address data, missing address components, and spelling mistakes. A dataset with a considerable number of geocoding inaccuracies can potentially result in an imprecise analysis and invalid conclusions. There has been little quantitative analysis of the amount of effort (i.e. time) to perform geocoding correction, and how such correction could improve geocode quality type. This study used a low-cost and easy to implement method to improve geocode quality type of an input database (i.e. addresses to be matched) through the processes of manual geocode intervention, and it assessed the amount of effort to manually correct inaccurate geocodes, reported the resulting match rate improvement between the original and the corrected geocodes, and documented the corresponding spatial shift by geocode quality type resulting from the corrections. Findings demonstrated that manual intervention of geocoding resulted in a 90% improvement of geocode quality type, took 42 hours to process, and the spatial shift ranged from 0.02 to 151,368 m. This study provides evidence to inform research teams considering the application of manual geocoding intervention that it is a low-cost and relatively easy process to execute.
地理编码是为邮政地址分配地理坐标（即纬度、经度）的科学和过程。地理编码的质量可能会因几个变量而有很大差异，包括输入地址数据不正确、地址组件缺失和拼写错误。一个存在大量地理编码不准确情况的数据集可能会导致分析不准确和得出无效结论。对于执行地理编码校正所需的工作量（即时间）以及这种校正如何能够提高地理编码质量类型，几乎没有进行过定量分析。本研究使用了一种低成本且易于实施的方法，通过人工地理编码干预过程来提高输入数据库（即待匹配的地址）的地理编码质量类型，并评估人工校正不准确地理编码的工作量，报告原始地理编码和校正后地理编码之间匹配率的提高情况，并记录校正后按地理编码质量类型对应的空间偏移。研究结果表明，地理编码的人工干预使地理编码质量类型提高了90%，处理耗时42小时，空间偏移范围为0.02至151,368米。本研究为考虑应用人工地理编码干预的研究团队提供了证据，表明这是一个低成本且相对易于执行的过程。
