This information sheet provides detailed information on the data processing practices performed by NAACCR on address data provided by Participating Member Registries for the purpose of geocoding using the Texas A&M University (TAMU) Geocoder hosted on the NAACCR servers. These details are provided for informational purposes only so that Participating Member Registries may understand and accept the risks of using the TAMU Geocoding services provided by NAACCR. NAACCR reserves the right to update or change these practices at any time without prior written notification to Participating Member Registries.

Process Overview

A Participating Member Registry may send address data to NAACCR to be processed using the TAMU Geocoder. This process associates geographic coordinates as output for each record within the input data using various software algorithms that analyze each input address supplied and identify the most appropriate corresponding geographic location from a set of geographic reference files to associate as output. When all records have been processed in batch, the Participating Member Registry is notified to download the results and delete the input and temporary files from the NAACCR servers.

Data Transmission and Storage

Input address data files are transmitted by the Participating Member Registry for processing using the TAMU Geocoder hosted on the NAACCR servers via the secure hypertext transfer protocol (https) to NAACCR’s secure web portal. The log-in username and password for the NAACCR secure web portal and password for encrypted files will be the same as the Participating Member Registry’s MyNAACCR account.

Once uploaded, the Participating Member Registry must go through a series of steps to identify the data fields of the Participating Member Registry file. Upon doing so, these data are loaded into NAACCR database servers for temporary storage while being processed by the TAMU Geocoding system. After processing has completed, the Participating Member Registry must delete the file from their account. This action removes the uploaded and processed Participating Member Registry files on the NAACCR servers and deletes the temporary database files used during processing.

Creation of the Geographic Location Data

The input address associated with each record in the Participating Member Registry file will have a geographic location computed for it using the TAMU Geocoding Platform hosted on the NAACCR servers. These servers will be secured according to the guidelines in place in the separate Geocoding Data Confidentiality and Security Agreement.

Geographic output data will be associated with the input record to create the resulting geographic location data file that will be returned to the Participating Member Registry. To compute the output geographic coordinates for each Input address record, the TAMU Geocoder will query the NAACCR database containing the temporary data loaded by the Participating Member Registry using the transactional-structured query language (T-SQL). These queries will return the input address (street address, city, state, ZIP) and unique non-identifiable record identified associated with all input address data records. As each record is obtained from the database server, the TAMU Geocoder will perform the geocoding task. This process will involve querying one or more databases that contain all of the geographic reference files usable by the geocoding system. The geographic reference features resulting from these queries are used to compute the geographic output. Once the output is generated, the TAMU Geocoder will write the geographic location data for each input record as additional fields within the input address data in temporary database storage. The final result of processing a complete input address data file will be that all records in the input address data file have geocoded information appended.