Esri Expands Its World Geocoding Service Capability

Redlands, California—July 11, 2017—Esri, the global leader in spatial analytics, today announced the release of significant enhancements to the World Geocoding service for the company's ArcGIS platform. This update to the World Geocoding service gives users access to 25 additional countries, including Cuba, Bangladesh, and Libya, where street addresses can be located.

World Geocoding empowers users to easily convert addresses into locations—and vice versa—on a map. These new enhancements include improvements such as refined address matching using the latest authoritative datasets, and easier identification of real locations. For the complex problem of intersection matching, the service has been improved to recognize more diverse types of intersections on a visual map showing features that don't physically meet, like overpasses above other roads, or streets that are connected by roundabouts. Coordinates can also be matched to points of interest, postal regions, administrative areas, and countries for enhanced reverse geocoding.

"Different regions around the world have many different formats and requirements for how people write an address on an envelope or how companies input a customer's information into their system," said Nick Patel, Esri product manager. "For the better part of this decade, we have invested millions of dollars in capturing address formats and rules around the world and built all this into address matching logic. It's important that the geocoding component is accurate, as this directly influences downstream analysis and decisions."

Hundreds of thousands of organizations around the world use Esri's World Geocoding capabilities to plot their data on maps.World Geocoding delivers street-level geocoding for over 130 countries, which covers more than 90 percent of the worldwide population. Users can interactively locate addresses on a map—one request at a time—or batch geocode many addresses at once.