Geocoding

In recent years, the increase in the number of hurricanes and other costal hazards in the US pose a tremendous threat to the residents of coastal states. According to the National Hurricane Center, Florida is the most vulnerable coastal state to hurricanes. Mitigation policies have been formulated to reduce mortality and provide emergency services by evacuating people from the hazard zone. Many of these evacuees, particularly the elderly or lower income populations, rely on evacuation shelters for temporary housing. Because of the cost and limited use, evacuation shelters are almost exclusively dual use shelters where the primary purpose of the facility is for some other public function (e.g. school, hospital, etc.). In 2000, the estimated shortage of public shelter spaces in Florida was about 1.5 million. The purpose of this study was to rank the existing and candidate shelters (schools, colleges, churches and community centers) available in the state based on their site suitability. The research questions examined in this study include: (1) How many candidate shelters are located in physically suitable areas (e.g. not in a flood prone area, not near hazardous facilities, etc.)?; (2) How many existing shelters are located in physically unsuitable areas, but in socially suitable areas (situated in areas with demand)?; (3) How many alternative existing and/or candidate shelters with high/very high physical suitability are located near physically unsuitable existing shelters and thus, may be better choices for a shelter?; and (4) How many existing shelters located in physically unsuitable areas are not near alternative existing and/or candidate shelters? A Geographic Information System-based suitability model integrating Weighted Linear Combination (WLC) with a Pass/Fail screening technique was implemented for the 17 counties of Southern Florida. It was found that 48% of the existing shelters are located in physically unsuitable areas. Out of all the candidate shelters, 57% are located in physically unsuitable areas. For 15 of the existing shelters in unsuitable locations, no alternative candidate or existing shelter with medium to high physical suitability exists within 10 miles (16.1 km).

Historical itineraries, often accessible as lists or tables describing places visited in sequence, are abundant resources and also important objects of study for humanities scholars. This article advances a novel method for automatically geocoding tabular itineraries, combining approximate string matching with a cost optimization algorithm based on dynamic programming. Experiments with a dataset of historical itineraries, with ground-truth geocoding annotations provided by domain experts and leveraging also the GeoN-ames gazetteer, attest to the effectiveness of the proposed method. The obtained results show that while approximate string matching can already achieve very low median errors, with many toponyms matching exactly against GeoNames entries, the combination with cost optimization can significantly improve results in terms of the average distance towards the correct disambiguations.

This study examined the sources of error involved in geocoding, by systematically evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of three widely used tools for geocoding. We tested them against a random sample of addresses from a state administrative address master file and found considerable variation in identification of census block geocodes of addresses. This high variation was mainly attributable to differences in preprocessing of addresses before geocoding and the reference street data used for geocoding. Preprocessing includes not only parsing and standardizing, but also correcting addresses against the US Postal Service Zip+4 Database, the master mailing address database maintained and updated regularly by USPS.

One of the most important features in many applications, especially in geographic information systems (GIS), is the capability tolocate addresses, i.e. to geocode the address. During the last year there has been also a significant progress to geocode addresses bycommercial Internet mapping APIs and Internet services. Geocoding became more popular and online mapping tools havepopularized the concept of using an address as an initial map navigation tool. In contrast to these commercial solutions with focuson industrialized countries, the project described in this paper is an implementation of a free, participatory, community orientedgeocoding service. The application offers a free geocoding tool as a substitute for commercial solutions and can be found at http://www.opengeocoding.org/

While commercial solutions concentrate on industrial countries – and offer only their service forpostal addresses in these countries – this service offers geocoding for developing countries. Hence, the application can be analternative to the existing commercial geocoding services, independent from the commercial solutions provided that a critical massof participants can be achieved.

The purpose of this paper is to expand empirical research on bus transit operation costs and test the hypothesis that physical and geographical characteristics are plausible explanatory cost factors. A translog cost function has been estimated, using a panel dataset of 1053 observations over 1996–2002 for a cross-section of 264 transit bus agencies in the US, combined with geographical and physical data processed with GIS technology. The results confirm the importance of geographical factors as determinants of bus transit costs. The trade-offs between geographical factors in shaping the frontier between economies and diseconomies of density are assessed. The implications of the results for public policy regarding competition are discussed.

Data monitoring is a key recommendation of the WHO Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel, a global framework adopted in May 2010 to address health workforce retention in resource-limited countries and the ethics of international migration. Using data on African-born and African-educated physicians in the 2013 American Medical Association Physician Masterfile (AMA Masterfile), we monitored Sub-Saharan African (SSA) physician recruitment into the physician workforce of the United States (US) post-adoption of the WHO Code of Practice. From the observed data, we projected to 2015 with linear regression, and we mapped migrant physicians’ locations using GPS Visualizer and ArcGIS. The 2013 AMA Masterfile identified 11,787 active SSA-origin physicians, representing barely 1.3% (11,787/940,456) of the 2013 US physician workforce, but exceeding the total number of physicians reported by WHO in 34 SSA countries (N = 11,519). We estimated that 15.7% (1,849/11,787) entered the US physician workforce after the Code of Practice was adopted. Compared to pre-Code estimates from 2002 (N = 7,830) and 2010 (N = 9,938), the annual admission rate of SSA émigrés into the US physician workforce is increasing. This increase is due in large part to the growing number of SSA-born physicians attending medical schools outside SSA, representing a trend towards younger migrants. Projection estimates suggest that there will be 12,846 SSA migrant physicians in the US physician workforce in 2015, and over 2,900 of them will be post-Code recruits. Most SSA migrant physicians are locating to large urban US areas where physician densities are already the highest. The Code of Practice has not slowed the SSA-to-US physician migration. To stem the physician “brain drain”, it is essential to incentivize professional practice in SSA and diminish the appeal of US migration with bolder interventions targeting primarily early-career (age ≤ 35) SSA physicians.

Libraries and researchers face a big challenge: sometimes thousands, millions of maps are being conserved in archives to retard deterioration, but this makes it hard to obtain specific knowledge of their content, sometimes even of their existence. In recent years, the efforts have increased to digitise historical documents and maps to preserve them digitally, make them accessible and allow researchers and the general public a less restricted access to their heritage. But maps are more than a cultural artifact: they are data. Data about the past that can very well be important for science and decision-making today.
The problem is, the vast amount alone makes it hard to know what to look for. Maps are usually archived and catalogued with limited meta-information, sometimes obscuring their actual content. This makes it impossible to find specific information without expert knowl-edge on history and cartography. Extracting the content, i.e. data, of scanned historical maps is a necessity to make the content searchable and to use modern digital tools for automatic processing and analyses.
To combine data from different maps and compare them with modern geospatial data, georeferencing is paramount. This is usually done by hand and needs a lot of time and spe-cialised training. We explore if and how usable GCP can be found automatically in historical maps with computer vision and document analysis methods of today. In this work-in-progress report, we use OCR on map labels and geocoding of persisting geographical feature designation for successful first experiments. This shows text recognition and vectorisation to be a promising research direc-tion for large-scale automated georeferencing of historical maps.

The combination of GPS services and information technology is increasing with the use of geotagging now occurring as a default action in many commodity based devices functionality for example mobile phones and cameras. The camera in suitably enabled phones takes the picture and embeds GPS co-ordinates of the location into the metadata of the resulting image file. Furthermore there are now online services such as foursquare that are targeted at the geotagging or geocaching community. In addition to this overtly designed service other social online services such Flickr, Twitter are providing a means of geotagging users. This enablement of technology has significant and profound effects on bpersonal security and also extending into corporate security.

The purpose of text geolocation is to associate geographic information contained in a document with a set (or sets) of coordinates , either implicitly by using linguistic features and/or explicitly by using geographic metadata combined with heuristics. We introduce a geocoder (location mention disambiguator) that achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on three diverse datasets by exploiting the implicit lexical clues. Moreover, we propose a new method for systematic encoding of geographic metadata to generate two distinct views of the same text. To that end, we introduce the Map Vector (MapVec), a sparse representation obtained by plotting prior geographic probabilities, derived from population figures, on a World Map. We then integrate the implicit (language) and explicit (map) features to significantly improve a range of metrics. We also introduce an open-source dataset for geoparsing of news events covering global disease outbreaks and epidemics to help future evaluation in geoparsing.

The what3words commercial geocoding system, founded in 2013, allows to locate geographical positions through the algorithmic assignation of a combination of three words, a textual tag that replaces the uncomfortably numerical lat-long coordinates. Each position has a resolution of 3x3 meters, and this means that every movement in space results in a new word sequence. With the possibility of a literary approach in the background, which pairs the what3words app with experimental poetry, I will draw a connection with Locative media art, specifically in its “annotative” form, which gives priority to the digital enrichment of physical spaces. In this context, the immediacy of human language earns a position of absolute importance: moving between the opposing poles of criticism of an artistic system that makes use of government technologies, and the possibilities of intervention in everyday life, Locative art seems to have traced the path for several commercial operations since the early 2000s. The what3words service represents an extreme example of the circulation of human language in the neogeographical space of digital cartography. All of this will be reconstructed taking into consideration fundamental artworks, inscribing them in the outcome of commercial geotagging applications and linking with some categories of twentieth century critical thinking: activism, graffiti, or concepts evoked by the International Situationist, such as dérive and détournement, which still today seem to represent actualized aspects of public art.

In spatial epidemiologic and public health research it is common to use spatially aggregated units such as centroids of postal/zip codes, census tracts, dissemination areas, blocks or block groups as proxies for sample unit locations. Few studies, however, address the potential problems associated with using these units as address proxies. The purpose of this study is to quantify the magnitude of distance errors and accessibility misclassification that result from using several commonly-used address proxies in public health research. The impact of these positional discrepancies for spatial  epidemiology is illustrated by examining misclassification of accessibility to several health-related facilities, including hospitals, public recreation spaces, schools, grocery stores, and junk food retailers throughout the City of London and Middlesex County, Ontario, Canada. Positional errors are quantified by multiple neighborhood types, revealing that address proxies are most problematic when used to represent residential locations in small towns and rural areas compared to suburban and urban areas. Findings indicate that the shorter the threshold distance used to measure accessibility between subject population and health-related facility, the greater the proportion of misclassified addresses. Using address proxies based on large aggregated units such as centroids of census tracts or dissemination areas can result in very large positional discrepancies (median errors up to 343 and 2088 m in urban and rural areas, respectively), and therefore should be avoided in spatial epidemiologic research. Even smaller, commonly-used, proxies for residential address such as postal code centroids can have large positional discrepancies (median errors up to 109 and 1363 m in urban and rural areas, respectively), and are prone to misrepresenting accessibility in small towns and rural Canada; therefore, postal codes should only be used with caution in spatial epidemiologic research.

This research provides an experimental project for the urban image of Napoli, in order to enhance its knowledge. Artists, who have painted it over time, have shaped a visual memory of its changes that is reinterpreted through a contemporary communicative key. The points of view, taken by the painters in various pictorial views, are identified and placed in a geocoded map, and then be connected to an augmented reality app, developing an implementable and interactive narrative about the 'imago urbis'.

This article pursues the idea that within interdisciplinary teams in which researchers might find themselves participating, there are very different notions of research outcomes, as well as languages in which they are expressed. We explore the notion of the software prototype within the discussion of making and building in digital humanities. The backdrop for our discussion is a collaboration between project team members from computer science and literature that resulted in a tool named TopoText that was built to geocode locations within an unstructured text and to perform some basic Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks about the context of those locations. In the interest of collaborating more effectively with increasingly larger and more multidisciplinary research communities, we move outward from that specific collaboration to explore one of the ways that such research is characterized in the domain of software engineering—the ISO/IEC 25010:2011 standard. Although not a perfect fit with discourses of value in the humanities, it provides a possible starting point for forging shared vocabularies within the research collaboratory. In particular, we focus on a subset of characteristics outlined by the standard and attempt to translate them into terms generative of further discussion in the digital humanities community.

Big, fine-grained enterprise registration data that includes time and location information enables us to quantitatively analyze, visualize, and understand the patterns of industries at multiple scales across time and space. However, data quality issues like incompleteness and ambiguity, hinder such analysis and application. These issues become more challenging when the volume of data is immense and constantly growing. High Performance Computing (HPC) frameworks can tackle big data computational issues, but few studies have systematically investigated imputation methods for enterprise registration data in this type of computing environment. In this paper, we propose a big data imputation workflow based on Apache Spark as well as a bare-metal computing cluster, to impute enterprise registration data. We integrated external data sources, employed Natural Language Processing (NLP), and compared several machine-learning methods to address incompleteness and ambiguity problems found in enterprise registration data. Experimental results illustrate the feasibility, efficiency, and scalability of the proposed HPC-based imputation framework, which also provides a reference for other big georeferenced text data processing. Using these imputation results, we visualize and briefly discuss the spatiotemporal distribution of industries in China, demonstrating the potential applications of such data when quality issues are resolved.

Geocoding is a method used to convert address information into geographical coordinates. It plays a vital role in displaying the relationship between geographic features and semantic information expressed in texts. The objective of this study is to reveal the quality of online geocoding from postal addresses in Turkey provided by Google Maps and Bing Maps services. The quality of geocoding services in urban areas is evaluated using two particular metrics; positional accuracy and address similarity. Positional accuracy measures the distances between point features obtained through the online geocoding and reference data. Address similarity indicates the relationship between two postal addresses based on a similarity index known as the Levenshtein distance. The same performance assessment was also made with the United States’ address data to make comparisons and discussions. The results show that services have  different geocoding capabilities in both countries because of the differen...

The increasing use of geographic information systems (GIS) in epidemiological population studies requires careful attention to the methods employed in accomplishing geocoding and creating a GIS. Studies have provided limited details, hampering the ability to assess validity of spatial data. The purpose of this paper is to describe the multiphase geocoding methods used to retrospectively create a GIS in the Jackson Heart Study (JHS). We used baseline data from 5,302 participants enrolled in the JHS between 2000 and 2004 in a multiphase process to accomplish geocoding 2 years after participant enrollment. After initial deletion of ungeocodable addresses (n = 52), 96% were geocoded using ArcGIS. An interactive method using data abstraction from participant records, use of additional maps and street reference files, and verification of existence of address, yielded successful geocoding of all but 13 addresses. Overall, nearly 99% (n = 5,237) of the JHS cohort was geocoded retrospectively using the multiple strategies for improving and locating geocodable addresses. Geocoding validation procedures revealed highly accurate and reliable geographic data. Using the methods and protocol developed provided a reliable spatial database that can be used for further investigation of spatial epidemiology. Baseline results were used to describe participants by select geographic indicators, including residence in urban or rural areas, as well as to validate the effectiveness of the study’s sampling plan. Further, our results indicate that retrospectively developing a reliable GIS for a large, epidemiological study is feasible. This paper describes some of the challenges in retrospectively creating a GIS and provides practical tips that enhanced the success.