PAGC: Geocoding -- Recent Advances and Future Developments

The Postal Address Geocoder (or PAGC) is an open source library and web service framework for geocoding locations based on either postal addresses, street intersections, or landmarks. The system offers a number of features that differentiate it from other open source geocoding software solutions:

• PAGC is written in ANSI C it runs on all major operating systems, and can be easily ported to nearly all operating systems
• PAGC is pre-configured to use data from several different providers (TIGER/Line, Statistics Canada's Road Network File, and others), and through the creation of a simple configuration file, it can easily work with data from a large number of other providers
• PAGC makes use of an advanced three-method probabilistic matching algorithm to provide the greatest possible match rate for street addresses
• PAGC can be used with multiple input data sources (shapefiles, SQLite database tables, and, soon, PostgreSQL/PostGIS database tables), and data stores (BerkeleyDB, SQLite, with PostgreSQL in the works)
• PAGC has the ability to provide an ID number in addition to geographic coordinates, which can greatly simplify database operations for location-based applications
• PAGC allows the user to edit road segment address ranges on the fly, enabling the user to overcome suppressed or altered address ranges frequently encountered in government originated road network layers

In this talk we will briefly discuss the history of the PAGC project, but really focus on the products features and recent developments (particularly as it relates to advances in data source and data store options) and the PAGC feature set road map (including better internationalization, a reverse geocoder, and a number of others) . In addition, we will present a demonstration of a location-based service that is made possible by using PAGC as a core underlying technology.