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

Mark Newnham mark at newnhams.com
Sun Jun 23 16:09:46 UTC 2013


I work in the Uitilities/Billing industry and do a reasonable amount of work in addressing quality (in order to get lower USPS rates with things like the Intelligent Mail Barcoder and suchlike). I'd just like to throw a couple of things in to enhance the discussion.

1. In 90% of cases in the US, The physical address (which can be found using a reverse geocode) is the Postal Address. Obvious areas of difference are:
a. PO Boxes
b. Rural Areas where there is no mail delivery. But in this case, the Physical address can be found using a reverse geocode.
2. In an earlier part of the thread, someone mentioned PO Boxes. These are Mailing Addresses not physical addresss. The distinction is important.
3. Importantly - 
   a. Both Google and Openstreetmap don't know anything about actual addresses in the US. For reverse geocode purposes, they just guess based on the approximate lat/long location.
  b.  An easy example to show you is this -  A search for "6188 South Poplar St, Centennial. CO" in both google and openstreetmap will both return results - Google will even give you a Streetview. But that property simply doesn't exist.  It never has/
  c. If you go to USPS, https://tools.usps.com/go/POLocatorAction.action they know that it doesn't exist. This is the address quality that USPS supplies.

USPS provides an easy to understand, comprehensive addressing method that would allow OSM to provide a consistent addressing methodology to addresses. For example, An armchair mapper might map an address like  North Caley as  North Caley, Nort Caley NTH Caley or N Caley. (These are the most common ways by the way for manually entered addresses).

The only reverse 911 addresses I have provided are validated USPS addresses.

If the USPS standard was applied to addressing (and it is a standard that everyone in the US knows and understands)  then OSM would be gain a leap in addressing quality. In fact, I would imagine that 75% of the work could be done by Bots

There are plenty of tools that the USPS supplies to enhance address quality.

https://www.usps.com/business/manage-address-quality.htm


Hope this helps the discussion

Mark




________________________________
 From: Bryce Nesbitt <bryce2 at obviously.com>
To: talk-us at openstreetmap.org 
Sent: Saturday, June 22, 2013 4:05 PM
Subject: Re: [Talk-us] what do we mean by geocoding?
 





On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 6:47 PM, Richard Welty <rwelty at averillpark.net> 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.

e911 is a very hopeful source for OSM: high quality coding would be huge.
For good background, read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1#Wireline_enhanced_911

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