An address regional tessellation method for spatial subdivision and geocoding in digital earth system

With the increased use of locational information, spatial location referencing and coding methods have become much more important to the mining of both geographical and nongeographical data in digital earth system. Unfortunately, current methods of geocoding, based on reverse lookup of coordinates for a given address, have proven too lossy with respect to administrative and socioeconomic data. This paper proposes a spatial subdivision and geocoding model based on spatial address regional tessellation (SART). Given a hierarchical address object definition, and based on the ‘region of influence’ characteristics of an address, SART creates multiresolution spatial subdivisions by irregular and continuous address regions. This model reflects most of the geographical features and many of the social and economic implications for a given address. It also better reflects the way people understand addresses and spatial locations. We also propose an appropriate method of geocoding for standard addresses (SART-GC). The codes generated by this method can record address footprints, hierarchical relationships, and spatial scales in a single data structure. Finally, by applying our methods to the Shibei District of Qingdao, we demonstrate the suitability of SART-GC for multi-scale spatial information representation in digital earth systems.