Geocoding is the process of assigning a location, usually in the form of coordinate values, to an address by comparing the descriptive location elements in the address to those present in the reference material. Addresses come in many forms, ranging from the common address format of house number followed by the street name and succeeding information to other location descriptions such as postal zone or census tract. In essence, an address includes any type of information that distinguishes a place.
Many common tasks are related to the geocoding process, such as creating and maintaining address locators, geocoding addresses, and getting addresses for point locations. The Geocoding toolbox contains tools to assist in accomplishing these tasks.
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
Creates a composite address locator. A composite locator consists of two or more individual locators that allow addresses to be matched against the multiple locators. | |
Creates a locator using reference data that contains a unique name or value for every feature stored in a single field. A locator created with this tool has broad applications. It can be used to search for names or unique attributes of your features, such as water meters, short place names, cell towers, or alphanumeric strings used to identify locations (for example, N1N115). | |
Creates a locator that can find the location of an address or a place, convert a table of addresses or places to a collection of point features, or identify the address of a point location. | |
Geocodes a table of addresses. This process requires a table that stores the addresses you want to geocode and an address locator or a composite address locator. This tool matches the addresses against the locator and saves the result for each input record in a new point feature class. When using the ArcGIS World Geocoding Service, this operation may consume credits. | |
Rebuilds an address locator to update the locator with the current reference data. Because a locator contains a snapshot of the reference data when it was created, it will not geocode addresses with the updated data when the geometry and attributes of the reference data are changed. To geocode addresses with the current version of the reference data, the locator must be rebuilt if you want to update the changes in the locator. | |
Rematches addresses in a geocoded feature class. | |
Creates addresses from point locations in a feature class. The reverse geocoding process searches for the nearest address or intersection for the point location based on the specified search distance. When using the ArcGIS World Geocoding Service, this operation may consume credits. |
In ArcGIS Pro 2.6 and later, the recommended tools for geocoding and creating locators are listed in the table above. In earlier versions of ArcGIS Pro, creating classic locators was performed using tools now available in the Legacy toolset.
| Toolset | Description |
|---|---|
The Legacy toolset contains tools that are used to build classic locators. | |
The Portal toolset contains tools that perform geocoding tasks with items on the portal. |
Two tools for packaging locators are available in the Package toolset in the Data Management toolbox.
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
Consolidate a locator or composite locator by copying all locators into a single folder. | |
Package a locator or composite locator to create a single compressed .gcpk file. |