[Talk-us] US Addressing

Brian May bmay at mapwise.com
Fri Nov 30 02:58:32 GMT 2012


On 11/29/2012 9:12 PM, Steven Johnson wrote:
>
> Secondly, about Census data... The Census Bureau publishes ZIP Code 
> Tabulation Areas (ZCTAs, as polygons) but they are an approximation of 
> US Postal Service data and used for downstream analytical purposes. 
> But as far as USPS is concerned, the ZIP code is a point data feature 
> that only exists to deliver the mail. The USPS does not maintain ZIP 
> codes as polygons.
For points coming from parcel centroids, Property Appraisers store 
mailing addresses, and they need to get that right in order to deliver 
the tax bills. When the owner mailing address and site address match, I 
would bet there is a high degree of accuracy for the city and zipcode 
values in the site address fields (where they are populated).

Where the site address zipcode was not available, and mailing street 
address matched site address, I have used mailing address zipcodes to 
map zipcode boundaries  and obtained what appeared to be good results.

Brian




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