Global Geocoding Module

Interactive Geocode Stage and REST Service

Interactive geocoding, also known as type-ahead, is now incorporated into the Global Geocoding Module (GGM) as a stage and a REST web service. Interactive geocoding returns match candidates as you type in the address.The feature in GGM allows you to create web applications, for example, mobile applications where a list of candidates is returned based on a few typed characters. The new Interactive Geocoding API conforms to the Global Geocoding API standards.

Data for interactive geocoding is available for 120 countries. See the Release Notes for the Q1 2018 data refresh for a list of countries. Customers of EGM datasets are entitled to the Interactive datasets for the same licensed countries. Note that the GGM stage that uses Interactive data will incur additional Spectrumâ„¢ Technology Platform licensing restrictions.

Interactive geocoding supports the return of address unit information. The REST service has the ability to return unit information when using enhanced data sets such as USA MLD or GBR with PAF datasets.

Interactive geocoding provides an administrative search preference to limit the search area and return candidates faster. This preference allows you to search on administrative areas such as towns and postcodes.

The interactive geocoding sample application has been integrated into the Global Geocoding API sample application. Interactive geocoding has a separate tab and allows clients to test type-ahead capabilities along with multi-line filtering.

Key Lookup Support Added to GGM

Key Lookup stage and web service in the Global Geocoding Module (GGM) allows you to get candidates returned when given a unique key for the address. Supported keys are PB_KEY for US MLD data and GNAF_PID for Australia.

Using EGM U.S. data in Global Geocoding Module

U.S. data for use in Spectrumâ„¢ Technology Platform Global Geocode Module is not yet available in SPD format. However, you can still take advantage of the new SPD extraction and configuration process by creating your own SPD files for U.S. data.

To create an SPD for U.S. data:

  1. Extract the zip file containing the U.S. data to a location of your choice.
  2. Create a folder at that location.
  3. Copy everything that was extracted and paste into the new folder.
  4. From the folder, copy metadata.json back to its original location.
    You will end up with a folder containing data and a file outside the folder called metadata.json.
  5. Zip the data folder and metadata.json together.
  6. Change the .zip extension to .spd.
You are now ready to extract and configure your U.S. SPD bundles. See the instructions under Spectrum Databases in the Spectrumâ„¢ Technology Platform Installation Guide.

Expanded Centroids for Global Geocoding Module USA

In some cases, more than one point-level geocode is available for an address matched in Master Location Data (MLD). When more than one point-level geocode is available from MLD data, only the highest quality geocode is returned with the matched address data.

The Expanded Centroids feature is available with MLD and the presence of an optional database us_cents.gsc. If an address match is found in MLD, and the optional database us_cents.gsc is added as a database resource, the optional us_cents.gsc is searched for additional geocodes for the matched address. If additional geocodes are found for the matched address, these are returned. The returned location code for an Expanded Centroids match will have an "APnn" value with a data type of "MASTER LOCATION".