With Placekey Toolbox for ArcGIS Pro, Users Can Match Addresses and POI Right Inside of Esri

Get The Placekey Toolbox for ArcGIS Pro here. Learn more, meet us, and see a demo at the upcoming Esri Dev Summit (Save your spot!)
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When Placekey launched late last year with the backing of 500+ organizations, it was introduced as a free and open location identifier. Over and above addresses, latitude/longitude coordinates, and other descriptors of a physical place, Placekey's provides a single, free universal location identifier that solves for difficult address and POI matching and data hygiene problems. Its unique design includes a “What@Where" structure, in which the "Where Part” describes the place’s geographical coordinates via the H3 hex and a “What Part” encodes for what is occupying those coordinates, including not only its address, but also point-of-interest (POI) information.

By simplifying and standardizing the description of physical places with a universal location identifier, Placekey introduces powerful set of possibilities for a multitude of geospatial problems— not the least of which is address and POI matching, which can be time-consuming and cumbersome in the face of disorderly datasets that are inconsistent, incomplete and incorrect.

Now, to help GIS data scientists and software developers do address and POI matching more efficiently and effectively, Placekey has launched the Placekey API Toolbox for ArcGIS Pro.

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What is the Placekey API Toolbox for ArcGIS Pro?

An alternative to spatial joins within Esri’s desktop GIS application, the Placekey API Toolbox for ArcGIS Pro lets you easily amalgamate disparate datasets using the Placekey attribute. Compared to traditional spatial joins, the Placekey attribute greatly improves geocoding match rates for addresses and POIs that are close together, including geocodes that are densely placed in urban areas and those that are stacked on top of each other, like apartments or offices.

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Why should you use the Placekey API Toolbox for ArcGISPro?

Improved match rates is one benefit of using Placekey as an alternative to spatial joins. Another is that Placekey eliminates the need to normalize datasets prior to joining them.

Take a former Starbucks store in St. Louis, for example: Starbucks St. Louis Galleria. It might be encoded as “Starbucks St.Louis Galleria” in one dataset, “Starbucks Saint Louis Galleria” in another dataset and “Saint Louis Galleria Starbucks” in yet another dataset. Similarly, its address might be encoded as “155 St. Louis Galleria Pkwy.” or “155 St.Louis Parkway.” Whatever name or address conventions are used, the Placekey API assigns the same Placekey to the same place, which means you don’t have to worry about resolving inconsistent input data.

That the same place receives the same Placekey, regardless of its name or address format, also simplifies address and POI deduplication.

How do you install the Placekey API Toolbox for ArcGISPro?

First, download the Placekey API Toolbox for ArcGISPro from the Esri Marketplace Listing (or download directly from Github) and unzip the downloaded file. Then, from within a project in ArcGIS Pro, locate the Catalog sidebar, right click on “Toolboxes,”then select “Add Toolbox.” Find and select the extracted file, then click “OK.”Now you’re ready to use the Toolbox.

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How do you use the Placekey API Toolbox for ArcGISPro?

For a tutorial, watch this short video by Riccardo Klinger, creator of the Placekey APIToolbox for ArcGIS Pro.

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Want to learn more?

To see all of Placekey’s pre-built integrations that will speed up your workflow, visit our integrations page.