Geocoding software

A custom geocoder⁹ was developed using TIGER/Line address range files to convert addresses into geographical coordinates. The program is a direct derivative of Geocoder::US 2.0, written by Schuyler Erle (seehttps://github.com/geocommons/geocoder), and is licensed under a GNU Lesser General Public License. Address range geocoding is detailed in depth and compared to address point and parcel geocoding elsewhere.⁶ Briefly, street names and zip codes are matched to street ranges provided by the US Census Bureau in TIGER/Line files, and house numbers are used to interpolate locations based on the ranges of house numbers corresponding to the matched street range shapefiles.

Containerization is an operating system–level virtualization method used for deploying and running software without using an entire virtual machine. Instead, containers run on a single host and retain the advantages of virtualization, namely, wrapping all of the components needed to run the desired software in a standalone package. Here we used Docker, a containerization platform, to create an image that batch-geocodes addresses (degauss/geocoder).