The last few years have seen tremendous growth in the usage of Spatial Data. Innumerable applications have contributed to the gathering of spatial information from the public. Application’s people use every day like Facebook and Flickr have also introduced features with which one can report their location. However, people are not generally interested in geographic lat-long. Names of places make more sense in a day to day life. Hence, all the applications report not the spatial co-ordinates but the named location (at different scale) where the person is. The tremendous amounts of location information generated have not gone unnoticed and several researches have been conducted to leverage this information. But, one issue that is frequently overlooked in researches that use these locations is the accuracy of the geocoding service that was used to get the named locations. Not only is displacement a problem but scale at which the location was geocoded will also have an effect on the study. The comparison of the various accuracy of the available geocoding services done by Roongpiboonsopit et. al. serves as a warning to anyone using the geocoded results.
-Dipto Sarkar