As more and more engineers, surveyors and other design professionals begin to see what a powerful tool GIS can be, GIS professionals are having to interact and share data with them much more frequently than in the past. Unfortunately most of these design professionals do not use the same software or data formats that we do in the GIS world. They typically use some form of computer aided design (CAD) software, such as AutoCAD. This means we, the GIS professional, must import and export the data created by the design professional.

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Do you have information in a table or a list that you would benefit from seeing on a map? Perhaps a list of customers or of potential business locations? Well, geocoding provides you with the opportunity to see your tabular data displayed spatially on a map. Geocoding is a mathematical process in GIS that takes inherently spatial data stored in tables or lists and applies to it geographic coordinates. The most common geocoding process, address matching, takes a table of street addresses and using a base street network, interpolates the locations of the street addresses and places points in the corresponding locations on the map. In order to showcase the usefulness of geocoding, an example is provided here.

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