On the suitability of Volunteered Geographic Information for the purpose of geocoding

The automated process of assigning geographic coordinates to textual descriptions of a place, generally referred to as geocoding, plays an important role in various fields of geographic information technologies, ranging from the analysis of health records or crime incidents to location based services like route planning applications. However, since the collection and maintenance of appropriate spatial data is the traditional domain of official surveying offices and commercial companies, there are only very few publicly available geocoding services which can be used free of charge, and those which exist are usually limited to a specific country or even smaller units. Furthermore, no freely available geocoding service offering house number level precision had so far been implemented based on volunteered geographic data. The goal of the work summarized in this paper (originating from the author’s MSc thesis) was thus to explore the suitability of volunteered geographic information for the purpose of geocoding.