A Geocoding Method for Natural Route Descriptions Using Sidewalk Network Databases

Abstract

A large amount of data including HTML documents and Internet mails has been distributed over the Internet. Most of the data on the Internet include geo-referenced descriptions. We have studied a method of converting such descriptions like addresses into their corresponding coordinates, that is, tuples of longitude and latitude. The process of converting descriptions into coordinates is called geocoding. In this paper, we focus on natural route descriptions as a new type of target to geocode. We first explain a core schema of sidewalk network databases on the basis of a characteristic of natural route descriptions, and then propose Formal Route Statement (FRS) to represent and process natural route descriptions by means of a computer. Also, we present our prototype system to geocode natural route descriptions using sidewalk network databases based on our proposed framework.