Quality analysis of online geocoding services for Thai text addresses
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Abstract
A number of online geocoding services are now available enabling fast access to map-based geolocation. However, the quality of these services is uncertain, often being based on poor data, especially in developing countries such as Thailand. This paper reports on a comparative analysis of the quality of five such online geocoding services, with tests based on text addresses and points of interest (POIs) in Thailand. The geocoding service providers included in our tests were Google, MapQuest, Bing, Yahoo!, and OpenCage and the text inputs were in Thai. The quality of the geocoded results was measured using the match rates and the positional accuracy. Two experiments were conducted, each with a different input format: (i) text addresses collected from research participants (N = 1,511), and (ii) names of POIs sampled from a dataset of Thai academic institutes (N = 5,000). The quality of the services tested was compared statistically using the Friedman test and the Wilcoxon signed rank test. The results show that Google outperformed all other services for both text addresses and POIs. Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and OpenCage each had match rates over 90%, while MapQuest’s match rate was 82%, but the positional accuracy of most services did not reach a high standard at rooftop levels. From this analysis, we identify geocoding issues that need to be addressed for further enhancement of the quality of the geocoding of addresses in Thailand. The knowledge obtained here also provides valuable insight into the geocoding issues facing Thailand and other developing countries, and it is hoped that this will benefit further research and the future development of high-quality geocoding tools.
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