Geocoding addresses based on own reference data

Question

I have a historical addresses dataset in form:

|Name   |Description  | 

Where "Name" is a single field with house number, street name, city and country. I have digitised two georeferenced historical maps of the location to cover the period and account for street name or geometry changes and for the addition of or removal of streets compared to present day.

This gives me point data for individual addresses and attributed polylines with geometry for the streets in the city:

AddressName: "59 Great Strand Street, Nulltown, GISland"  
DigitisedMapName: "Great Strand Street, Nulltown, GISland"

I now wish to join these up matching based on the street name, giving the street geometry to the address data and plotting the address a certain % along the street based on the house number.

I have tried the ArcMap 10.2.2 address locator but get 0% matched leaving only a manual selection (not feasible given the number of records).

Is it possible to complete this task in PostgreSQL instead to strip the mapped geometry from that table and give it to the AddressName record? Or are the wheels going to fall off in the joining accuracy?

Answer 1

Given your 0% match combined with your mention of digitized historic maps (big props to you for putting in the work required to represent change over time!!) it's likely that you need to link some additional attribute data to your roads before any sort of geocoding will work.

every road segment, for example, in the u.s. census bureau's road network is packed with info that aids geocoding. for example the attributes LFROMADD | LTOADD | RFROMADD | RTOADD provide the starting/stopping street numbers for both sides of the segment. a spatial/attribute join to add attributes to your historic maps might be more trouble than it's worth, so the best plan might be...

geocode your addresses using a modern data set chock-full of attribute goodness and visualize the resulting points over your old maps. you'll have to do some manual editing to correct for new/moved/abandoned roads, but the vast majority of addresses remain stationary over time. should work.