I will summarize my thoughts from my blog post – A lesson in address storage (on archive.org). On my current project [I work for a logistics company] we’re storing international addresses. I’ve done research on addresses all over the world in the design of this portion of the database. There’s a lot of different formats. … Read more
Google has a geocoding API which seems to work pretty well for most of the locations that they have Google Maps data for. http://googlemapsapi.blogspot.com/2006/06/geocoding-at-last.html They provide online geocoding (via JavaScript): http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/services.html#Geocoding Or backend geocoding (via an HTTP request): http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/services.html#Geocoding_Direct The data is usually the same used by Google Maps itself. (note that there are some … Read more
The term you’re looking for is geocoding and yes Google does provide this service. New V3 API: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/ Old V2 API: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/services.html#Geocoding
The answer probably depends how critical it is for you to receive support and possible customization for this service. Google can certainly do this. Look into their XML and Geocoding API’s. You should be able to craft an XML message asking Google to return Map coordinates for a given address. If the address is not … Read more
Here’s a free and sort of “outside the box” way to do it. Not 100% perfect, but it should reject blatantly non-existent addresses. Submit the entire address to Google’s geocoding web service. This service attempts to return the exact coordinates of the location you feed it, i.e. latitude and longitude. In my experience if the … Read more
For more international use, one schema to consider is the one used by Drupal Address Field. It’s based on the xNAL standard, and seems to cover most international cases. A bit of digging into that module will reveal some nice pearls for interpreting and validating addresses internationally. It also has a nice set of administrative … Read more
I’ve done a lot of work on this kind of parsing. Because there are errors you won’t get 100% accuracy, but there are a few things you can do to get most of the way there, and then do a visual BS test. Here’s the general way to go about it. It’s not code, because … Read more
It is possible to represent addresses from lots of different countries in a standard set of fields. The basic idea of a named access route (thoroughfare) which the named or numbered buildings are located on is fairly standard, except in China sometimes. Other near universal concepts include: naming the settlement (city/town/village), which can be generically … Read more
I saw this question a lot when I worked for an address verification company. I’m posting the answer here to make it more accessible to programmers who are searching around with the same question. The company I was at processed billions of addresses, and we learned a lot in the process. First, we need to … Read more