[postgis-devel] [PostGIS] #1109: Lake Drive is good; Lake DR - not so good

[PostGIS]

#1109: Lake Drive is good; Lake DR - not so good
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 Reporter:  mikepease       |       Owner:  robe         
     Type:  defect          |      Status:  new          
 Priority:  high            |   Milestone:  PostGIS 2.0.0
Component:  tiger geocoder  |     Version:  1.5.X        
 Keywords:                  |  
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Comment(by chodgson):

 This seems like a bigger problem; Many street types could also be
 potential street names, for example consider:

 west crescent
 crescent rd

 I think the real problem is in the expectation of there being only a
 single way to normalize an input string - there are guaranteed to be
 ambiguous cases. Note that having multiple normalizations doesn't
 necessarily mean there are multiple results - there may not be a 100 1st
 St in 'Paul', but there may be a 100 1 St in St. Paul. Note it could also
 be the other way around, though I don't know of city named 'Paul'... there
 are a lot of Saints, sometimes it might be true. Sometimes the existence
 of a given street address on a given street name in a given city or zip
 code will reduce the number of possible results - however sometimes the
 multiple parsings/normalizations will produce many additional possible
 results - and really the geocoding part of the code should know about the
 different normalizations, and the normalizations might need a score/rating
 as well, which would carry through into the geocoding.

 From my experience with geocoding, assuming there is a single "normalized"
 interpretation for any given input string is just not going to work for
 many cases. And I'm not even talking about really random stuff, I'm
 talking about inputs that would actually make sense to a human (and a
 local resident would be able to identify easily).

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/ticket/1109#comment:5>
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