Quality of automatic geocoding tools: a study using addresses from hospital record files in Temuco, Chile

Autor: Maria Elisa Quinteros, Carola Blazquez, Felipe Rosas, Salvador Ayala, Ximena Marcela Ossa García, Juana Maria Delgado-Saborit, Roy M. Harrison, Pablo Ruiz-Rudolph, Karla Yohannessen
Jazyk: English<br />Spanish; Castilian<br />Portuguese
Rok vydání: 2022
Předmět:
Zdroj: Cadernos de Saúde Pública, Vol 38, Iss 1 (2022)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1678-4464
0102-311x
DOI: 10.1590/0102-311x00288920
Popis: Abstract: Automatic geocoding methods have become popular in recent years, facilitating the study of the association between health outcomes and the place of living. However, rather few studies have evaluated geocoding quality, with most of them being performed in the US and Europe. This article aims to compare the quality of three automatic online geocoding tools against a reference method. A subsample of 300 handwritten addresses from hospital records was geocoded using Bing, Google Earth, and Google Maps. Match rates were higher (> 80%) for Google Maps and Google Earth compared with Bing. However, the accuracy of the addresses was better for Bing with a larger proportion (> 70%) of addresses with positional errors below 20m. Generally, performance did not vary for each method for different socioeconomic status. Overall, the methods showed an acceptable, but heterogeneous performance, which may be a warning against the use of automatic methods without assessing quality in other municipalities, particularly in Chile and Latin America.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals