Table 2.

Geocoding system operational capabilities metrics

Category and notes	Metric	Description and/or example
System Flexibility	User defined reference layers	Is it possible to use any available reference data
Ability of the user of the system to make changes and additions to data sources and methods used by the system	Specialized address parsing	Add in support for new street types, named places
	Specialized matching algorithms	Consider neighboring areas for matches
	Customized feature hierarchies	Hierarchy based on organizational policy
System Integration	Operating system support	Windows, Unix/Linux/Solaris
Ability to merge a geocoding system into an existing production system	System/Workflow Integration	Into tools and systems used by the organization (eg SAS wrappers)
	Varying operational modes	Batch/interactive/manual
	Desktop Version	Standalone product for highly sensitive data
	In-house Server Version	Internal server for multiple users within agency firewall
	API Version	Vendor or custom-written code for off-site processing
Metadata	Spatial confidence values	Descriptions of the region size (geographic area) that a geocode output is known to fall within
Types and level of detail reported about the quality of the output data and/or the characteristics of the geocoding system	Input address/matched address concordance	Descriptions of which attributes of the input address were incorrect, incomplete, partially matched or not used in the matching process
Capabilities	Automatic batch geocoding	The ability to process a data file of records using a single process
Baseline functionality of paramount importance to agencies working with large health data sets	Interactive review	The ability to perform manual review for non-matched records to attempt to determine a correct output geocode
	Alias tables	The ability to incorporate tables of named places, common synonyms for street address attributes
	Weighted centroids	The ability to bias the output location of a geocode based a known distribution of a characteristic of interest such as the distribution of population or specific subsets of a population in an area