Address matching geocoding

Street addresses are the most common form of locational information. Yet an address is merely text information, containing a house number, street name, direction, and zip code. The GIS needs a mechanism to transfer this text information to calculate geographic coordinates before an address can be displayed on a map. Address geocoding is the process of linking an address to a physical location on the earth. To do so, the GIS associates addresses stored in a tabular file with a spatial data set which has addresses, usually a street centerline file or a point address file (Volusia County has both). The GIS then uses the coordinates of the street features to calculate and assign coordinates to addresses in the file. The result is a new spatial data layer of point locations representing the addresses from the file that can be used for further analysis.