Listers,
I am about to jump on a soapbox here and vent at the commercial vendors who
sell street centerline data for geocoding. I am in the process of drawing
new street segments in our district and putting address ranges on them as a
supplemental table for geocoding students. In the process of doing this, I
thought I would be able to copy the address ranges from the comercial
dataset. Wrong, over 61000 street segments in this commercial dataset (for
which we paid specifically to use for geocoding)have no address ranges,
zero, zip. We are not talking about just small obscure streets, there are
major streets in this dataset that should have an address range - even if
they just estimate it based upon its location on the map! And the commercial
dataset is not editable! So I end up having to query out the street
segments in which there are no address ranges, save the query as a table and
then edit that. This has become a much larger process than adding a few
hundred new streets to the district. And this isn't the only incidence of
incorrect data, I have sent the incorrect streets and ranges to the vendor
for correction. And I am starting to think that perhaps as we correct their
data and let them know, we should get something for this!
I realize that the commercial vendors are working a large area, and I also
realize that my concerns are small to them, but data quality and integrity
has to be important at some level? Am I expecting too much here? Is this an
ongoing problem that we in the industry have decided not to push? I am
going to advise my boss not to purchase commercial street centerline data or
geocoding programs until we can be assured that we will get reliable data -
not perfect data, but at least much more reliable data. What are others
doing along these lines? I am really interested to know.
Fran Peck
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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