Address geocoding

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Address geocoding, or simply geocoding, is the process of taking a text-based description of a location, such as an address or the name of a place, and returning geographic coordinates, frequently latitude/longitude pair, to identify a location on the Earth's surface.^[1] Reverse geocoding, on the other hand, converts geographic coordinates to a description of a location, usually the name of a place or an addressable location. Geocoding relies on a computer representation of address points, the street / road network, together with postal and administrative boundaries.

• Geocode (verb):^[2] provide geographical coordinates corresponding to (a location).
• Geocode (noun): is a code that represents a geographic entity (location or object).
  In general is a human-readable and short identifier; like a nominal-geocode as ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, or a grid-geocode, as Geohash geocode.
• Geocoder (noun): a piece of software or a (web) service that implements a geocoding process i.e. a set of interrelated components in the form of operations, algorithms, and data sources that work together to produce a spatial representation for descriptive locational references.

The geographic coordinates representing locations often vary greatly in positional accuracy. Examples include building centroids, land parcel centroids, interpolated locations based on thoroughfare ranges, street segments centroids, postal code centroids (e.g. ZIP codes, CEDEX), and Administrative division Centroids.