Using an Optimized Chinese Address Matching Method to Develop a Geocoding Service: A Case Study of Shenzhen, China

With the coming era of big data and the rapid development and widespread applications of Geographical Information Systems (GISs), geocoding technology is playing an increasingly important role in bridging the gap between non-spatial data resources and spatial data in various fields. However, Chinese geocoding faces great challenges because of the complexity of the address string format in Chinese, which contains no delimiters between Chinese words, and the poor address management resulting from the existence of multiple address authorities spread among different governmental agencies. This paper presents a geocoding service based on an optimized Chinese address matching method, including address modeling, address standardization and address matching. The address model focuses on the spatial semantics of each address element, and the address standardization process is based on an address tree model. A geocoding service application is implemented in practice using a large quantity of data from Shenzhen Municipality. More than 1,460,000 data records were used to test the geocoding service, and good matching rates were achieved with good adaptability and intelligence.