I am not going to go into the workflow of how addresses are turned into a geographically-referenced points on a map. You can find that out by contacting the vendors I will mention below. But, it is important to understand that good address standardization is a key to quality.

Earlier in the week, I had a conversation with representatives from Sagent, the company that acquired QMS, which had been one of the companies that supported geocoding solutions. QMS was acquired by Sagent because it had a key component of what used to be called “database marketing” or “data warehousing” and now is more commonly referred to as “business intelligence” applications or customer relationship management (CRM). Sagent's GeoStan is a geocoding module; its Spatial +  has the ability to store spatial primitives in a binary file and execute spatial queries rapidly. Centrus is Sagent's complete solution for data quality and address standardization, and thus provides more than simply processing lists of names and hoping to get good geocodes. One key buzzword that I latched onto that will be used by Sagent in future promotions is "operational GIS"; a term they used to describe applications where location is an essential, daily element to analyze investment return and  financial risk.

The shakeout in this industry did not stop with QMS. Matchware Technologies was acquired a few years ago by Vality, which in turn has just been recently acquired by Ascential Software, a company emphasizing "enterprise data integration." Trillium Software, a Harte-Hanks company, offers CRM, an eBusiness suite, and data warehousing. Group 1 also provides many solutions for data quality and our own Marty Sohovich is a contributing editor for geocoding solutions. Group 1 emphasizes CRM and has recently been integrating some of its applications with Siebel 7.

Closer to home, many "pure GIS" companies --- Navtech (NAVSTREETS), Tele Atlas (EZ-Locate), GDT (Matchmaker), and MapInfo (MapMarker) -- employ their own geocoding engines and OEM these products to GIS software companies. Most evolved as an ancillary tool since the street centerline databases that are being sold already maintain accurate block address ranges as an attribute.

I wish I could tell you which ones would win the overall award  in a "shoot-out," but to adequately assess the qualities of each, it would be necessary, obviously,  not only to look at hit rates but the positional representation after the geocode is created. I welcome more comments from readers on this subject as this is meant to present a resource for you to perform your own research. Good luck.