[Talk-us] what do we mean by geocoding?

Paul Norman penorman at mac.com
Sun Jun 23 01:04:28 UTC 2013


> From: Richard Welty [mailto:rwelty at averillpark.net]
> Subject: Re: [Talk-us] what do we mean by geocoding?
> 
> On 6/21/13 9:39 PM, Mike N wrote:
> > On 6/21/2013 1:42 PM, Richard Welty wrote:
> > Surveying postal addresses by opening mailboxes (illegal) or knocking
> > on doors doesn't seem feasible.
> >
> but the enhanced 911 addresses are basically the same as the postal
> addresses and have the potential to become available. i'm working on
> that in my part of upstate NY.

For the choice between defining addresses as street addresses or as postal
addresses and where street addresses are verifiable on the ground and postal
addresses are not, it seems to make sense to me to use the verifiable street
addresses in preference to the postal addresses.

My last job had different street addresses and postal addresses.

The street address was

Main Building
6951 Westminster Highway
Richmond, BC
	
The postal addresses were

PO Box 5350 Stn Terminal	
Vancouver BC V6B 5L5
	
*and* 

PO Box 4700 Stn Terminal
Vancouver, BC V6B 1J1	
	
I'm not sure how the mail got routed. I think we had enough mail for them to
send an entire truck every day filled with mail just for us.

Something else worth noting is this isn't an either-or situation for
geocoding. There is no reason you can't have both the street address and
postal address geocode to the same physical location. It is common to have
multiple inputs geocode to the same location.

For reverse geocoding you probably want the street address, not the postal
address. I suspect looking up the address of a point to navigate there is
far more common than looking up the address of a point to send it mail.

For what it's worth for my last place of work Google only returns a result
for the street address, not the postal addresses. The point Google returns
is also off by about 12km. Bing is the same for what returns, but it's
reasonably accurate.




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