ABSTRACT
In cancer registry practice, states are required to submit latitude and longitude data based on patient residential address at diagnosis and to assign addresses to corresponding census tract units. In this chapter, the authors review some of early geocoding practices, establish some empirical benchmarks for geocoding quality, and provide some management tips for geocoding projects. They begin with ArcGIS-based geocoding with address standardization and address sensitivity analysis, and then move to identify post office box locations and unmatched addresses. The assessment of unmatched addresses from ArcGIS suggests that a fair amount of address cleaning, reverse address finding, and regeocoding of Internet-based geocoding would be required. In assessing geocoding quality, we accepted the location generated from a geocoder in ArcGIS, whether it was an exact match to the address location or an interpolated one within a matched address range.
