Iterative Batch Geocoding With Atlas GIS Version 4.0

First Pass: Exact Street Matches First, make sure the Geocoding/Address Finder CD is in your CD drive. This is how the screen should look for your first pass at geocoding. These will be the most precise matches. Make sure that Unmatched Rows Only appears in the Rows To Geocode box. When you are sure this and the other settings are correct, click on the BATCH button. First Pass

Second Pass: Relaxed Street Matches Now, relax the matching options as shown above -- if time permits, relax the options one at a time, beginning with directionals. These will be the next most precise matches. Make sure that Unmatched Rows Only appears in the Rows To Geocode box. When you are sure that this and the other settings are correct, click on the BATCH button.

Third Pass: Zip+4 & Zip+2 Matches For the third pass, make sure that under Match Methods the Zip+4 and Zip+2 options are checked, and that Unmatched Rows Only appears in the Rows To Geocode box. When you are sure that these and the other settings are correct, click on the BATCH button.

Fourth Pass: Interactive Matches After the third pass, almost all of the records should be matched. To make sure that the addresses that don’t match are correct and valid, repeat this step and click on the INTERACTIVE button. Inspect the records, one- by-one, and if you find discrepancies in the street address, correct them, and click on the “Retry” or if that does not solve the problem, the “Retry Relaxed” buttons. In your particular database, incorrect zip codes seem to be the problem in many cases. Try deleting the zip code and then “Retry Relaxed”. If you now get a match with a message like “Relaxed Zip, exact address”, you have fixed the problem. click on “OK-Next Error” to solve the next error.

Fifth Pass: Zip Code Cetnroid Geocoding & Producing “Trouble Address” List After you have interactively geocoded all the records you could not match before, it is likely that you will still have unmatched records. These will be coded to the “Zip Code Centroid”, the precise physical center of the zip code. Select Zip Code alone as the Match Method, and make sure that Unmatched Rows Only appears in the Rows To Geocode box. When you are sure that these settings are correct, click on the BATCH button. Periodically, you may want to create a list of policy records that you had to geocode to the zip code centroid. The best way to do this is to Query-Select By Value on the Policy layer, with the expression ISMISSING(“LAT”), click on OK. Then go to Window- New Table Window, choose Policy, click on OK. Then choose View - Selected Features Only to view only those records missing a latitude. Now, choose Edit-Copy Rows to copy these records -- and paste them into Excel to create a list of “trouble addresses” which can be reviewed both by management and by RPM to determine why they did not geocode.