Geocoding Inventor Locations

• This page is part of a series under the NBER Patent Data Project

This page details the various matching techniques used to Geocode inventor locations in the NBER patent data. Geocoding inventor locations entails matching the inventor addresses provided in the patent data to known locations through-out the world and recording their longitude and latitude.

The reference data for the locations (which provides the longitude and latitudes) is taken from the (U.S.) National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's GEOnet Names Server (GNS) which covers the world excluding the U.S. and Antartica.

Details of the GEOnet Names Server

• Place names are recorded in Romanized form
• Country (and province/territory) names, as well as their assigned codes, are recorded using FIPS Standard #10. Users should note that there are differences between the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) country names and the UN Country Names.
• The GNS output format contains various custom codes