Another useful and common tabular spatial data source is a street address. There are many applications for geocoding addresses, such as mapping the customer base for a store, members of an organization, public health records, or incidences 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 sides 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. This...