Redlands, California—October 17, 2011—The University of Southern California, Esri, NAVTEQ, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are launching the first International Geospatial Geocoding Conference, to be held December 6–7, 2011. The conference will be held in the state-of-the-art Esri Conference Center in Redlands, California.

Geocoding is critical to data acquisition and management of information on people, assets, and infrastructure. The conference will encourage organizations to improve accuracy through address standardization, data source improvements, enhanced management strategies, and better workflows that can save millions of dollars annually and reduce costly errors.

This first-of-its-kind, two-day event aims to bring together leading minds in academia, industry, and government to discuss geocoding research, development, technology, and applications for industries including health, intelligence, transportation, engineering, planning, emergency response, marketing, law enforcement, and insurance.

The conference will include a series of keynotes, paper presentations, breakout groups, and panel discussions. The lively and interactive conference will offer many networking opportunities between developers of the technology and its users.

Keynote presenters at the conference will include

• Tim Trainor, chief of the Geography Division at the United States Census Bureau. Trainor began his federal government career as a cartographer with the Defense Mapping Agency, joining the bureau's Geography Division in 1980. Today he is responsible for directing all work related to geographic and cartographic development and implementation activities for the bureau.
• Don Cooke, Esri Community Maps evangelist. Working with digital mapping and geospatial technologies for 45 years, Cooke was a member of the census team that developed the Dual Independent Map Encoding (DIME) method of computerized street maps. This led to the creation of the nationwide Census Bureau Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER) files, which are the most complete public domain street database in the world.

"Many industry sectors have similar needs, challenges, and problems when it comes to address management and geocoding," says Jack Dangermond, Esri president. "Historically, expertise in one area has not been fully leveraged by others. It is my hope that this forum will help overcome that. Together, we can eradicate these challenges and start to lay the foundation of a common geocoding framework from which everyone will benefit."

For more information and to apply to attend, visit geocodingconference.com. Attendance is limited to 200.

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