4 ms·
After working with address data for the past year or so, my answer is yes please. Address data is so incredibly difficult to work with and it's pretty clear th
by bpchaps 10y ago
After working with address data for the past year or so, my answer is yes please.
Address data is so incredibly difficult to work with and it's pretty clear that it's difficult for everyone involved. Census data is incorrect, OSM is often incorrect, other free sources are filled with typos, post office is consistently bad (No, my last name is not Nicholson...), shapefiles are often haphazardly done. It's so difficult to work with. That said, the amount of quality work to even get it to this point is amazing. Serious kudos to everyone who helps out here.
I've spent an asinine amount of time recently trying to get Chicago's parking ticket data cleaned up. Lake Shore drive is probably the #1 culprit:
Unique lake shore drive instances:
$ grep "LAKE SH" tickets.csv | awk -F';' '{print $7}' | sed 's/.*LAKE/LAKE/' | sort | uniq | wc -l
128
Example of the awfulness:
LAKE SHORE DDRIVE
LAKE SHORE DER
LAKE SHORE DE WEST
LAKE SHORE DIE
LAKE SHOR EDR
LAKE SHORE DR ''
LAKE SHORE DR AV
LAKE SHORE DR AVE
LAKE SHORE DR EAST
LAKE SHORE DREIVE
- jandrese 10y agoGiven how many of those are typos I'm not sure how much advantage there is in replacing them with compressed incomprehensible strings. Typo one of these map codes and you'll end up in a different zip code and at first glance nothing will look wrong because they are designed for machines, not people.
- bpchaps 10y agoWell, more it would emphasize (and pretty much require) a better organized system. The lack of emphasis on proper addressing from everyone makes life pretty hard. :)
- thisisdave 10y agoTo some extent, this could be addressed with standard error detection/correction techniques (e.g. error-correcting codes). But that would make the strings longer and often wouldn't help until they made it to a computer anyway.
- bpchaps 10y agoThe units have GPS in them. The number of possible streets near them is pretty small, so an autocomplete or similar might work really well. Or just a dropdown.