Reverse geocoding is the process of converting a location as described by geographic coordinates (latitude, longitude) to a human-readable address or place name.
Reverse geocoding permits the identification of nearby street addresses, places, and/or areal subdivisions such as neighbourhoods, county, state, or country.
For example, when a GPS coordinate is entered the street address is interpolated from a range assigned to the road segment in a reference dataset that the point is nearest to.
[citation needed] These services require manual input of a coordinate, capture from a localisation tool (mostly GPS, but also cell tower signals or WiFi traces[1]), or selection of a point on an interactive map; to look up a street address or neighbouring places.
In addition, where direct reference to the geography of the area mapped is not required, it may be possible to use abstract space on which to display spatial patterns.