Pitney Bowes MapInfo Professional - Manual (Page 377)

• Street name
• Apartment, Suite, Floor, Room number or some other piece of information. Many addresses do not
have this component
MapInfo Professional has one procedure for dealing with the street number and another procedure for
dealing with the street name. MapInfo Professional deals with the third component, if present, as though
it were a part of the street name.
When you geocode your table with street addresses, MapInfo Professional matches the addresses in
your table to the street names and address ranges in a street table, such as StreetPro (Pitney Bowes
Software Inc.'s premier streets data product) and assigns X and Y coordinates to your records. When
you display your records, MapInfo Professional will spot the record at the location of the record's address.
MapInfo Professional places the record on the proper side of the street, offsets it from the side of the
street to the specified distance, and insets it from the end of the street the specified percentage of the
line. The Options dialog box controls these parameters. For more about setting the street offset in the
Options dialog box, see Street Offset in the Help System.
Geocoding by Boundary
In computer mapping, the term boundary is used to designate enclosed regions or areas such as countries,
cities, and postal codes. When you geocode your table with boundaries, MapInfo Professional matches
the boundary name in your table with the boundary name in the search table. MapInfo Professional
assigns the boundary centroid X and Y coordinates to your data records. The centroid of a boundary is
its approximate center point.
For example, you have a table of wholesale outlet stores. You want to assign X and Y coordinates to
each record according to county. MapInfo Professional reads the county name from your table, matches
it with the county name in the search table, and assigns the county centroid coordinates to each of your
records. The outlet locations will display at the county centroid in a Map window.
Geocoding by US_ZIPS.tab (Postal Code Centroid File)
US_ZIPS.tab is a point file that is included with the base MapInfo Professional package. The file consists
of postal code centroid points for every postal code in the United States. This file can be used to geocode
any database that includes postal code information. This file includes postal codes that are assigned to
individual buildings or companies.
You can use any of the above methods to geocode your records, or you can use a combination of address
and boundary geocoding to increase the potential for a successful match.
Geocoding by Server
If you have access to a geocoding server such as MapMarker or Envinsa Server, you can geocode using
a more extensive data set.
Refining Your Geocoding Search
When geocoding, you might refer to objects whose names are used for other objects that do not interest
you (for example, a city name that is common to two or more states). To eliminate this problem, refine
your search by selecting another column (from, typically, another table). To further refine the search,
specify the state for each city, rather than just the city name.
If your area of interest is not unique enough for MapInfo Professional to automatically determine the
position or location, you will need to refine your geocode search by specifying a particular boundary that
contains your area of interest. This will provide MapInfo Professional with geographic locations on where
to position your points.
Finding an Exact Street Match
When MapInfo Professional geocodes, it attempts to find an exact match between source and target
street names. That means that the addresses must be the same, character for character. However,
377 MapInfo Professional User Guide
Chapter 14: Putting Your Data on the Map