[OSGeo-Discuss] The existence (and value of) "clean" geocoding tools?

[David Dearing]

Thanks for the good variety of responses!

Certainly there is no way to perfectly automate geocoding.  That's just 
a very hard problem and, as Stephen mentioned, there are so many 
possible spelling/formatting differences that it's impossible to plan 
for every case.

Although, to steer this away from the "where is a good geocoding engine" 
line of thought, I am curious of the use of these systems.  I think we 
all agree that current systems do not reach, as I termed it, "clean" 
geocoding of a document.  Does this cause a problem for the applications 
of the geocoded data?  I'm not very familiar with the traditional uses 
of these systems.  Does it need to be manually corrected or are the 
applications happy with "pretty good"?

dave