Online Geocoding of Millions of Economic Operators

Abstract

Geocoding is the process of converting an address or a place name into geographic coordinates. This conversion process has become a fundamental subject in many scientific domains and real world applications, from health and crime analysis to route optimization. In this paper, we present a conversion process of over 4.5 million entities, mostly Portuguese Economic Operators, through their addresses or names. We also describe how this information can be useful to detect and remove duplicate information in databases. The results demonstrate the power, flexibility and accuracy of many of today’s online geocoding services.