Geocoding locations near a specified city

摘要

Specified streets or intersections that are within a specified distance of a specified city can be found by a search, even when they are not actually in that city. For computational efficiency, some addresses are included in search results even when they exceed the specified distance from the specified city by a small amount (“false positives”). The search method guarantees that no instance of the street name within the specified distance of the specified city is erroneously missed (“false negatives”).

主权项

1. A method for locating a geographic object, the method comprising:
receiving, by a computer, an address of a geographic object to be located, the address including at least a street address component and a first city address component representing a city in which the street address is not located; determining a buffer distance; determining, by the computer, a set of geographic objects, each object in the set having an address including the street address component and a second city address component differing from the first city address component and representing a city in which the street address is located, wherein a distance from each of the objects to the city represented by the first city address component does not exceed the buffer distance by more than a threshold amount; returning indicia of at least one of the set of geographic objects; and displaying at least one of the geographic objects on a digital map.