Geocoding is the process of assigning a location, usually in the form of coordinate values, to an address by comparing the descriptive location elements in the address to those present in the reference material. Addresses come in many forms, ranging from the common address format of a house number followed by the street name and succeeding information to other location descriptions such as postal zone or census tract. An address includes any type of information that distinguishes a place.

The address locator is the major component in the geocoding process. An address locator is created based on a specific address locator style. Once created, an address locator contains the geocoding properties and parameters, a snapshot of the address attributes in the reference data, and the queries for performing a geocoding search. The address locator also contains a set of address parsing and matching rules that directs the geocoding engine to perform address standardization and matching.

When creating a local geocode service the Path and LocatorName properties should be set prior to starting the service. The Path can represent an absolute or relative path to an Locator Package (.gcpk), a Geodatabase or folder. The LocatorName is the name of the AddressLocator within the Address Locator Package, Geodatabase or folder workspace (which may contain one or more Address Locators). If the LocatorName is not specified the first Address Locator found in the workspace Path will be used.

Once the Path and optionally the LocatorName properties are set the local geocode service must be started prior to using it in conjunction with the Locator Task. There are several options available when managing the lifetime of the service. The simplest option is to use the static convenience methods provided as class extensions on the Locator task class InitializeWithLocalService and InitializeWithLocalServiceAsync. Alternatively to start the service directly there is an asynchronous StartAsync method and a synchronous Start method.

System.Object
   ESRI.ArcGIS.Client.Local.LocalService
      ESRI.ArcGIS.Client.Local.LocalGeocodeService

Target Platforms: Windows XP Professional, Windows Server 2003 family, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 family, Windows 7, Windows 8

Reference