Understanding address verification…

Getting an address correctly verified or understanding geocode accuracy is not a matter of simple right or wrong. To take advantage of the processing power we use accuracy codes for addresses and geocodes. The codes tell you the quality of the input information and what our process did to each address field. The report codes also provide guidance on how to correct the input data if necessary.

Our primary report code is returned with each address record as a field called AVC (Address Verification Code). This tells us the level at which the output address is both verified (the first section) and standardized (second section). It’s important to note that not all addresses will successfully validate. Where an address is either too garbled, incomplete or not covered by Loqate’s reference data, the Loqate service will attempt to standardize and validate as much of the address as it can. When Search is used, the Loqate engine will attempt to provide a useful set of candidate addresses to choose from.

The secondary report code is the field status code, which can be enabled with the fs parameter. This returns a status code which each address field that tells you the level of verification and how the field value was generated.

For a full breakdown of both AVC and field status codes, please visit: http://www.everythinglocation.com/accuracy-codes/

Verification/Standardization levels

• 5 - Delivery Point or Sub-building (such as Flat, Ste or Fl)
• 4 - Premise (such as house/building number of name)
• 3 - Thoroughfare (also referred to as street, road, avenue, etc)
• 2 - Locality (such as city, town or similar)
• 1 - AdministrativeArea (such as region, state or county, depending on the country)

What’s in the output?

Regardless of the process being used, each address record that comes back from our web service has a range of fields including both component and composite fields that can be used in different types of application:

• AVC - Address Verification Code (see above).
• Component fields - individual parts of the address, in case you want to isolate particular fields or build your own address format/output schema.
• Composite fields - Address1-n and DeliveryAddress1-n. These fields organize the component fields as specified by the origin country’s postal authority. The DeliveryAddress block excludes the regional fields (such as Locality, AdministrativeArea, PostalCode and anything wider)
• Geocode fields (if requested) - A Geo-Accuracy Code, Latitude, Longitude and a Geo-Distance marker (in meters). The latter estimates the margin of error as a radius

A full list of output fields can be referenced here: http://www.everythinglocation.com/field-descriptions/

Address Validation for 240+ countries

That’s right, we provide address validation, search and geocoding for over 240 countries! This doesn’t mean we have every single delivery point in the World, but our reference data coverage is unrivalled for countries with structured postal systems.

For a full list of country data coverage please visit: http://www.everythinglocation.com/address-coverage/

Address Transliteration for 9 Character Sets

Do you have Cyrillic address data that you don’t know how to validate or store? Or maybe you have a database with a mixture of Kanji, Hangul and Simplified character sets? Our OutputScript server setting (using the opts parameter) can be set to either Native or Latn (Latin).

Native scripts supported include: Cyrillic (Russia), Hellenic (Greece), Thai (Thailand), Hangul (South Korea), Arabic (UAE), Simplified Chinese (China), Kanji (Japan), Hebrew (Israel) and Latin (rest of the World). With any of these character sets, you choose how to input and output the address record!