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 <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
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 <[email protected]> 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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