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PxPoint™

Advanced Geocoding Technology

For asset management, billing, customer information management, marketing, risk management, or other enterprise applications, businesses that rely on location in the decision-making process require accuracy. That is why companies in any industry can benefit from PxPoint™, the next-generation of geocoding technology, for unprecedented positional and spatial accuracy.

PxPoint was developed by the team who revolutionized the industry with the first national address geocoder. As a high-precision geocoding and spatial analytics engines, which utilizes multiple data sources including, U.S. parcel boundary, PxPoint delivers accurate locations for properties across the United States.

For analyzing geographic relationships near or surrounding a geocoded location, such as how far an insured policy is from the coastline or determining the correct tax jurisdiction for a property, PxPoint offers multiple spatial operations to compute location and distance information.

Designed as a single API, PxPoint integrates seamlessly into existing architectures or can be hosted by clients via an XML/SOAP Web service. Optionally, businesses can utilize PxPoint Online, First American's Web portal, to geocode multiple addresses.

Features

PxPoint Features
PxPoint can integrate into multiple computer operating systems, and can also be accessed as a Web service. This makes for many convenient deployment options. Key features include:

Geocodes to any map feature type: Point, Line, or Polygon
Supports reverse geocoding
Allows real-time or batch processing

Advanced Geocoding
Over the past decade, geocoding methodology has evolved: from extrapolating a location from the address ranges on a street segment; through soundex and reverse soundex; through a whole host of ways to get an address that is currently in text or a file to its actual location on the map. First American Spatial Solutions has taken geocoding to the next level by introducing point-level geocoding which provides a parcel centroid and the parcel boundaries and couples the geocoding engine with spatial analytics. PxPoint provides you with these unique geocoding capabilities:

Geocode to a Layer of any Feature type - Point, Line, or Polygon
Geocode to Parcel Polygons for the most accurate geocoding available in the U.S.
Geocode to multiple Layers at once

As part of its overall feature set, PxPoint geocodes to multiple address layers. Some examples of layers include NAVTEQ street centerlines and points-of-interest (POIs) throughout North America, First American U.S. Parcel Polygons, and U.S. Postal Service (USPS) ZIP Code files. PxPoint can also process spatial files created for geocoding and spatial analysis.

Spatial Analytics
Spatial analytics provide you with intelligence about a location. By analyzing the spatial information associated with the geocoded location, and the spatial layers, you can gain new insight into the location and its surroundings. PxPoint spatial analytics provide you with answers to questions like:

Which risk zones (fire, flood, earthquake, and so on) is this location in or near?
How far is this location from my nearest store or closest competitor?
What sales and use taxes are required for this location?

PxPoint spatial analytics include Point-in-Polygon, Line-in-Polygon, Polygon-in-Polygon(including Polygon overlap), and Distance-to-Nearest computations.

Technical Overview

Address Geocoding

The address geocoding system created by First American Spatial Solutions is the key component of the PxPoint system. This system accepts an address as input and matches the input record to the highest precision geocoding object (or dataset) available. Geocoding objects are data objects containing latitude and longitude information. Examples of geocoding objects are post code centroids, street segments and parcels. The geocoding methodology presented here is based on years of knowledge accumulated by the design team.

The address geocoding process is divided into several systems to handle the logical steps of the process. The advantages of this approach are that modules that create processing bottlenecks may be replicated in separate threads to produce geater overall processing efficiency. Also the code is better able to adapt to new geographies and languages by adding new modules in the flow as the need arises. Finally the code becomes much easier to maintain and improve since the contact for each module is clearly specified and easily understood.