Place name aliases let you associate names of well-known places with street addresses—for example, the names of museums, hospitals, or landmarks. When geocoding an address, the place name alias table is consulted first. If a place name is found, the street address from the place name alias table is geocoded.

There are four main parts of the process of creating a new address locator with place name aliases. The first is to choose a locator style that uses an AltName. The second is to point the locator at the data that it will be used to match against. The third is to match the fields that the locator expects to see against the fields in the reference (street) data. The fourth is to set the table that contains the aliases.