Online Geocoding Services: A Benchmarking Analysis to Some European Cities

Geocoding is the computational process that allows to transforming an address of a place into a location on the Earth's surface using geographic coordinates. The quality of geocoding have a relevant importance in spatial analysis. Furthermore, in recent years we seen an enormous spread of Web technologies that involved a growing number of users. At the same time have been born many Online Geocoding Service that support the increasingly WebGIS consumer applications. For these reasons, we present GFgeocoder, a tool based on a methodology capable to benchmark efficiently Online Geocoding Services. GFgeocoder analyzes geocoding result obtained by some Online Geocoding Services. The tool is written in Java language and it allow to make parallel requests to the Online Geocoding Services, passing in input the files containing strings of addresses. We used as input results of geocoding strings of addresses, published by some European local governments in their open data portals.