SPATIAL APPROACHES TO REDUCING ERROR IN GEOCODED DATA by Daniel Wright Goldberg A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

xiii Chapter 1: Introduction 1 1.1 The Role of Geocoding in Research and Practice 1 1.2 Motivation and Problem Statement 6 1.3 Geocoding Quality Metrics 9 1.3 Thesis Statement 11 1.4 Contributions of the Research 11 1.5 Outline of the Dissertation 12 Chapter 2: From Text to Geographic Coordinates – A Review 14 2.1 Chapter 2 Introduction 14 2.2 The Concept of Geocoding 16 2.3 Geocoding Fundamentals 20 2.4 Geocoding Error 31 2.5 Persistent Geocoding Difficulties 37 2.6 Chapter 2 Conclusions 41 Chapter 3: Improving Geocoding with Spatially-Varying Block Metrics 42 3.1 Chapter 3 Introduction 42 3.2 Chapter 3 Related Work 47 3.3 The USC Geocoder 48 3.4 Feature Match Scoring 54 3.5 Chapter 3 Experimental Evaluation 81 3.6 Chapter 3 Conclusions 107 Chapter 4: Improving Geocode Accuracy with Candidate Selection Criteria 109 4.1 Chapter 4 Introduction 109 4.2 Chapter 4 Related Work 113 4.3 The Formalization of a Best-Match Criterion 114