Another useful and common tabular spatial data source is a street address. Geocoding addresses has many applications such as mapping the customer base for a store, members of an organization, public health records, or incidence of crime. Once they are mapped, the points can be used in many ways to generate information. For example, they can be used as inputs to generate density surfaces, or they can be linked to parcels of land, and characterized by socio-economic data. They may also be an important component of a cadastral information system.

An address geocoding operation typically involves the tabular address data and a street network dataset. The street network needs to have attribute fields for address ranges on the left- and right-hand side of each road segment. You can geocode within QGIS using a plugin named MMQGIS (http://michaelminn.com/linux/mmqgis/). MMQGIS is a collection of vector data-processing tools developed by Michael Minn. To install the plugin...