AN AGENT-BASED FRAMEWORK TO ENABLE INTELLIGENT GEOCODING SERVICES

Geocoding is essential to translating a physical address such as a house, business or landmark into spatial coordinates. These coordinates represent location which is an essential ingredient for location based services and web mapping. Despite progress in the field of geocoding, there remains a sizable proportion of addresses that are difficult to geocode. The purpose of this research was to explore how agent-based processing, which utilizes the belief, desire, intention (BDI) model, can add intelligence to the geocoding process. The event driven nature of agent-based processing makes it suitable for use in a web service platform. The event-driven and reactive behaviour is complemented by the ability for goal directed and non-deterministic behaviour in the longer term. Overall control of the geocoding process is based on the interactions between agents which represent the geographic elements contained in an address. Each of these agents operate in parallel, pursuing tasks associated with correcting and preparing their individual element for geocoding. This results in a geocoding process that has multiple foci of control and is iterative. The same geographic relationships that exist between the address elements also exist between the agents. Messages are used for the agents to send and receive data between themselves, and because the agents represent geographic elements, these messages have content relating to their real world geographic relationships. These relationships form the basis of the inherent semantics in the intelligent framework. Results indicate that intelligence in geocoding is a product of both context and semantics, at a conceptual level, and control and knowledge, at an implementation level, where the two are "connected" by the agent paradigm which is both a representation and a solution. This paper presents the agent component of the framework used to enable intelligent geocoding and the results from a prototype implemented using the intelligent framework.