Addressing What Matters: Geocoding gone wrong
Every day many of us use geocoding software to find the location of addresses.? Google Maps of course dominates this technology space, they report a billion users every month.? Back in 2022, Google Maps was the 4th most frequently used phone app in the United States behind YouTube, Facebook and Gmail.
Getting a latitude and longitude for an address has become very easy.? Getting it “right” is a difficult and complex challenge. And I spend much of my professional life helping the largest companies in the world get it right.?
But what happens when Geocoding goes wrong? Well, you end up in the wrong place of course. Using navigation software, getting it wrong often means it takes longer to find the right store or you are frustrated because you missed the turn-off because the restaurant was located in the middle of the highway. When it comes to automated use of geocoding for business users however, the most frequently identified “wrong place” in the world is Station 13010-Soul.?
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This moored meteorological observation buoy is one of many that makes up the “Prediction and Research Moored Array in the Tropical Atlantic” or PIRATA - a system developed jointly by the US, Brazil and France to study ocean-atmosphere interactions in the tropical Atlantic. ?
It’s significance for geocoders is that it resides at the coordinates 0,0 i.e. zero longitude and zero latitude, where the prime meridian and the equator intersect.? Or to say this another way, because the geocoder (or software connecting to the geocoder) had some kind of problem, the result was “null” and you ended up finding what has become known as “Null Island”, a fictional 1 meter square island some 400 miles off the coast of Ghana.
The term “Null Island” was coined in 2011 by the authors of Natural Earth, a public domain map dataset.? But it has since become an inside joke among us geographers, and especially those of us working in the world of geocoding where human error often interferes with the high-quality results our customers have come to expect, and they are left stranded in the middle of the Atlantic.
Director at InTouch Geospatial Services Ltd
1 年The inappropriate use of Google Imagery in identifying locations of features can lead to be being wrong but not knowing about it. Google Imagery is great but it has it limitations ...it was never intended for surveying purposes but many are now using it to map the locations of site boundaries, habitat and landscape features but mostly these are in the "wrong location". The mosaic of individual satellite images from different companies, different satellites, different dates and different resolutions all mean that "edge matching" adjacent images can be a bit "variable" to say the least - often with a big "jump" visible between adjacent images (particularly noticeable for railway lines and overhead power lines). In this instance, both images can't both be in the right location, and often both are not correct. Coupled with rather vague orthorectification and obliqueness of the imagery means that features on Google imagery are mostly not where they appear...but are somewhere else???? (admittedly this may only be a few metres away, but a few metres on a site assesment can be quite significant !).
Senior Director, Data Analysis at Zoominfo (NASDAQ: ZI)
1 年I also like default 19010101 DOB in the data.