About the new address locators for geocoding

StreetMap Premium now includes a new set of locators that provide many benefits over the classic locators that are deprecated:

NOTE: These locators are built like the ones used for the ArcGIS Online World Geocoding Service.

The new address locators available with the ArcGIS StreetMap Premium Middle East and Africa 2021 Release 1 street dataset enable you to geocode and reverse geocode addresses in the Middle East and Africa.

NOTE: Esri strongly recommends that you always use these new locators with the latest releases of ArcGIS Pro and/or ArcGIS Enterprise, and that you review and install appropriate patches from Patches for ArcGIS StreetMap Premium on the ArcGIS website. A StreetMap Premium extension for ArcGIS Enterprise and ArcGIS Pro are required for the new locators or a geocoding service to function correctly.

NOTE: With ArcGIS StreetMap Premium Middle East and Africa 2021 Release 1, the Minimum Match Score (MMS) changes from 60 to 75 for all locators to eliminate some false positive matches, especially for point address and street address matches. In addition, the Minimum Candidate Score (MCS) changes from 60 to 70. These changes stay consistent with the same changes made in the April 2021 release of the ArcGIS Online World Geocoding Service. Note that some valid postal and locality matches may be missed with this higher MMS, although users may change the default settings for the MMS and MCS in the locator properties back to 60, if desired. However, a fix to address this issue of lost postal and locality matches is available in ArcGIS Pro 2.8 (released in May 2021), ArcGIS Enterprise/Server 10.9.1 (released in November 2021), and in the June 2021 release of the ArcGIS Online World Geocoding Service.

The new locators are included with each StreetMap Premium release as well as the separate quarterly Locator Update releases on My Esri.

The following geocoding match types and category filtering are supported in the new locators, although not all countries contain data for every level: Address (subaddress, point address, street address, distance marker, street intersection, street name); Postal; Populated Place (block, sector, neighborhood, district, city, metro area, subregion, region, territory, country, zone); Points of Interest; and Coordinates.

For more detail on the geocoding coverage, quality levels for each country, and category filtering, see the ArcGIS REST API Geocode coverage page.

Input mapping fields for addresses are standardized across the global locators and include the fields: Address, Postal, Neighborhood, City, Subregion, and Region; although some countries do not utilize all four administrative place fields as input:

When you use ArcGIS Pro for geocoding, you can browse for any of these address locators. For details, see Introduction to locators and Geocode with StreetMap Premium new locators in ArcGIS Pro in ArcGIS Pro help and Use the new locators on the ArcGIS website.

You can utilize categories with the new locators if, for instance, you want to geocode to only one or two match types (for example, PointAddress, StreetAddress, and so on). You can do this easily in the Locator Properties in ArcGIS Pro by right-clicking the locator in Catalog and selecting Locator Properties. Select Geocoding options on the left, and scroll down to the Categories to support section, where you can select only the categories that you wish to enable. If you're using the Geocode Addresses tool in ArcGIS Pro to do batch geocoding, you do not need to change categories in the Locator Properties, since the option to specify categories is already part of the tool's dialog.

If you're using categories to return only SubAddress, PointAddress, and StreetAddress matches, the Minimum Match Score should be adjusted, which you can also do in the Locator Properties under Geocoding options. Esri recommends using the values specified for the following locators, which will maximize your match rate without introducing an unacceptable number of false positive matches:

Locator File Name Recommended Value
ARE.loc 95*
EGY.loc 93*
ISR.loc 92
NGA.loc 92
QAT.loc 94*
SAU.loc 93*
ZAF.loc 92

* Determined from English and transliterated Arabic input only; Arabic language input unavailable for testing.

This can be adjusted if you find it’s too restrictive (too high) and excluding too many good matches, or if it’s not restrictive enough (too low) and allowing for too many false positives. For example, if your input addresses are very clean and properly formatted, a higher Minimum Match Score may be used. Conversely, if your input addresses are of a lower quality because of missing address components or extra information, a lower value may result in more matches. Regardless of the category/categories that you specify, it’s always a good practice to review your own input address data and geocoding match results when deciding on a Minimum Match Score that best suits your needs. Note that as they are determined, recommended Minimum Match Scores for other Middle East and Africa countries will also be made available.

Suggestions functionality is available in the new locators whether used directly in ArcGIS Pro or when published as a geocoding service. After publishing a new locator, you can consume the suggestions REST API in your own applications.

The following new address locators are available with ArcGIS StreetMap Premium Middle East and Africa 2021 Release 1:

Locator File Name Locator Name Description
ARE.loc United Arab Emirates Locator Contains points of interest and address data (street address, street names, postal centroids, and populated place centroids) in United Arab Emirates.
BHR.loc Bahrain Locator Contains points of interest and address data (street address, street names, postal centroids, and populated place centroids) in Bahrain.
BWA.loc Botswana Locator Contains points of interest and address data (street address, street names, postal centroids, and populated place centroids) in Botswana.
EGY.loc Egypt Locator Contains points of interest and address data (street address, street names, postal centroids, and populated place centroids) in Egypt.
ISR.loc Israel Locator Contains points of interest and address data (street address, street names, postal centroids, and populated place centroids) in Israel.
JOR.loc Jordan Locator Contains points of interest and address data (street address, street names, postal centroids, and populated place centroids) in Jordan.
KEN.loc Kenya Locator Contains points of interest and address data (street address, street names, postal centroids, and populated place centroids) in Kenya.
KWT.loc Kuwait Locator Contains points of interest and address data (street address, street names, postal centroids, and populated place centroids) in Kuwait.
LBN.loc Lebanon Locator Contains points of interest and address data (street address, street names, postal centroids, and populated place centroids) in Lebanon.
LSO.loc Lesotho Locator Contains points of interest and address data (street address, street names, postal centroids, and populated place centroids) in Lesotho.
MAR.loc Morocco Locator Contains points of interest and address data (street address, street names, postal centroids, and populated place centroids) in Morocco.
MiddleEastAfrica.loc Middle East and Africa Locator Contains points of interest and address data for 74 countries in the Middle East and Africa.
MOZ.loc Mozambique Locator Contains points of interest and address data (street address, street names, postal centroids, and populated place centroids) in Mozambique.
NAM.loc Namibia Locator Contains points of interest and address data (street address, street names, postal centroids, and populated place centroids) in Namibia.
NGA.loc Nigeria Locator Contains points of interest and address data (street address, street names, postal centroids, and populated place centroids) in Nigeria.
OMN.loc Oman Locator Contains points of interest and address data (street address, street names, postal centroids, and populated place centroids) in Oman.
QAT.loc Qatar Locator Contains points of interest and address data (street address, street names, postal centroids, and populated place centroids) in Qatar.
REU.loc Reunion Locator Contains points of interest and address data (street address, street names, postal centroids, and populated place centroids) in Reunion.
SAU.loc Saudi Arabia Locator Contains points of interest and address data (street address, street names, postal centroids, and populated place centroids) in Saudi Arabia.
SWZ.loc eSwatini (Swaziland) Locator Contains points of interest and address data (street address, street names, postal centroids, and populated place centroids) in eSwatini (Swaziland).
ZAF.loc South Africa Locator Contains points of interest and address data (street address, street names, postal centroids, and populated place centroids) in South Africa.

Creating geocoding services

To create a geocoding service using these new locators you may publish them from ArcGIS Pro to your Portal, or publish them from ArcGIS Pro directly to your Server, no Portal installation necessary. For either option, you must install the StreetMap Premium extension for both ArcGIS Enterprise and ArcGIS Pro. To publish from ArcGIS Pro directly to your Server, use the following method:

  1. First, create a connection to your server. See the ArcGIS Pro help for additional information on how to create server connections. In the Add ArcGIS Server Connection dialog box, add your Server URL, username, password, and check the Save Username / Password to Windows Credential Manager option. If the connection is successful, your server connection is now visible in the Catalog pane under Servers.
  2. Then, in the Catalog pane under Servers right-click your server connection. Go to Publish > Geocode Service. Then in the Publish Geocode Service dialog box, enter the service details and finish publishing the desired locator.

For details on publishing and using these address locators in ArcGIS Enterprise, see the Sharing a locator to your portal and the geocoding topics in ArcGIS Pro Help. For suggestions on optimizing performance for geocoding services published from the new locators, see the StreetMap Premium website. If you wish to restrict use of a geocoding service to certain users within your organization, create a group in your Enterprise Portal. Then, publish a geocoding service and share the service only with that group. Invite the designated users to the group.

NOTE: Creating geocoding services with some of the larger new SMP locators can consume a significant amount of RAM on the ArcGIS Server machine. For example, on top of the RAM required to run ArcGIS Server (approximately 2 GB), you will need roughly an additional 5 GB of RAM per instance (SOC) to publish a geocoding service using the ZAF locator. See the Memory section on the StreetMap Premium website to estimate the RAM needed to publish various new locators. For any locator smaller than 2 GB in size, 16 GB of RAM should be sufficient. In addition, with all other things being equal, the use of a solid state drive (SSD) instead of a hard disk drive (HDD) will improve batch geocoding performance.

Locator Properties

Additional locator properties have been added that include support for the following:

For multicountry locators such as MiddleEastAfrica.loc, the intersection connectors property is not available for editing, as each country has a unique set of intersection connectors.

File Output Field Definitions

The following File Output Field Definitions may be helpful:

Addr_type

The indicator of precision of the match type for an address. Possible values include:

Match_addr

The full matched address formatted in the local country address schema. This is the correct address format based on address standards for a country.

Status

Score

A number from 1–100 indicating the degree to which the input tokens in a geocoding request match the address components in a candidate record. A score of 100 represents a perfect match, while lower scores represent decreasing match accuracy.

Side

For SubAddress, PointAddress, and StreetAddress matches, this field indicates which side of the street (L or R) the address falls on relative to feature digitization rather than direction of travel along the street.

DisplayX/DisplayY

For the SubAddress and PointAddress matches, these fields store the decimal degree coordinates for the parcel centroid or rooftop centroid associated with each address, as the geocoded point feature is located on the street segment near the main entrance to the property by default. Note that beginning with the June 2020 Release of the ArcGIS Online World Geocoding Service, the default location of PointAddress and SubAddress matches changed from the routing location on the street to the address location (parcel or rooftop centroid).

NOTE: When batch geocoding in ArcGIS Pro with the Geocode Addresses tool, the new locators provide the option to set the Preferred Location Type to be either the Routing Location (the street centerline/entry point on the street) or the Address Location (the parcel centroid or rooftop centroid) for the geocoded results. You can also manage this in the locator files so that you get the preferred location when using Locate in ArcGIS Pro. Right-click the locator in Catalog and select Locator Properties. Select Geocoding options on the left. Under Preferred location type, choose Routing Location or Address Location.

Distance   

The physical distance in meters from a candidate to a specified location. The Distance output value is calculated for each candidate when the Location input parameter is passed in a request using the Find or findAddressCandidates methods. If the Location parameter is not passed in a request, then the value of Distance is zero.

For a more complete list of possible locator output fields, see the ArcGIS REST API: World Geocoding Service documentation.