HOW TO

Increase the zone weight when geocoding

Last Published: April 25, 2020

Summary

A zone is considered city, state, or zip code, but is not limited to these values when mapping zone fields. For instance, an emergency service number value can be used as the zone and mapped to the city field when building the locator.

Increasing the weight of the zone gives it a higher priority than the street suffix type. This is helpful when the street suffix type of the input address has a high probability of being incorrect. Increasing the weight of the zone causes the candidate with the correct zone to be returned with a higher score than the candidate with the incorrect zone.

Procedure

The instructions provided demonstrate how to increase the zone weight when geocoding.

  1. Open the existing address locator (*.loc.xml) in a text editor, preferably NotePad++ or an XML editor.
  2. Browse or search for the 'multiline_grammar' tag.
  3. Scroll down to the MultiLineAddress and multilineZone reference tags. These tags control the relative weight scoring given for the address and the zone.
    [O-Image] Locator
  4. Increase the weight of the multilineZone property to be slightly higher than the MultiLineAddress property.
  5. Save the edits.
    Note:
    Rebuilding the address locator is not required.
  6. Geocode using the changes made to the address locator.
    Note:
    If it is necessary to adjust the weights, make the changes and save the *.loc.xml file and continue geocoding with the address locator.

Article ID:000012764

Software:
  • ArcMap
  • ArcGIS Pro 2 x

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