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The Address Point Layer: An Inhouse Approach

There are many county departments who benefit from a complete address layer. E911 benefits from such a layer to be able to pin point an address for emergency response teams. Census requests statistics of how many homes there are in the county. Many offices have databases which tie to an address. It became apparent that an address point layer would be an invaluable dataset. Though Jasper county is largely rural with a total of less than 20000 homes, the task of obtaining GPS locations for every house was overwhelming considering that this would be accomplished by Jasper County employees. We also wanted to be able to tie into the Assessor's Tax parcel database and E911's address database. All addresses are logged on one or the other of these databases (at least in theory). With these considerations, this seemed to be the most sensable approach: 1.) Extract the parcels which had a locational address and create centroid points for each of those parcels. 2.) Using aerial photography, move those points to the driveway. 3.) Compare this dataset with the E911 database and geocode the addresses from the e911 database which did not match the parcel dataset. 4.) Move those points to the driveway. 5.) Those points for which we could not find a sensable placement, we field checked and obtained a GPS location. After the initial thrust of building an address layer the challenge is to maintain that layer. This is accomplished through communication with the other offices as well as the incorporated communities within the county