[postgis-devel] PSC Vote: Bringing PAGC address standardizer into the PostGIS code base

[Stephen Woodbridge]

On 6/6/2014 11:19 PM, Paragon Corporation wrote:
> A while back Steve Woodbridge  segmented out the address standardizer logic
> that is used in PAGC geocoder so that it works in PostgreSQL.  This many
> postgis tiger geocoder users have been using for address standardizing
> (instead of the clunky normalizer one packaged with postgis tiger geocoder).
>
> It's gotten a bit confusing where to turn to since the code base of that is
> separate and when people have bugs about it they post to PostGIS ticket
> tracker.
>
> Eventually I'd like to work with Steve to make a next generation geocoder
> that uses this standardizer that would be packaged with PostGIS.
> Although we can argue the address standardizer can stand on its own, I think
> most people using it use it with PostGIS and generally as part of the
> geocoding process.   It would make packaging it by package maintainers and
> standardizing on its use a lot easier (which is one of the things Linux
> folks have complained about that its not already available when they install
> PostGIS from repo).
>
> I've documented the request here:
>
> http://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/ticket/2387
>
>
> Are all people (PSC in particular) okay with this or are their concerns.
>
> Of course this means we also need to give Steve commit rights to our code
> base.
>
> Thanks,
> Regina

I think this makes a lot of sense because the PAGC project is all but 
dead and this piece of their code base is useful. I have discussed this 
with Walter Sinclair, the author, and he also thinks it is a good idea. 
While he has been busy with other other project for the last year, he 
has expressed an interest in working on this in the future and 
potentially extending it to work better with European addressing and 
other areas that might be of interest to the community.

Regardless of that happening, I am willing to continue supporting it in 
its current form. I have built both a Tiger geocoder and a Navteq 
Geocoder using the this code base and it is very stable and configurable 
in it current form.

Regina and I already discussed a lot of improvements that we could do to 
the Tiger Geocoder that would simplify the codebase and make it more 
supportable and generally more useable with data other datasets beyond 
Tiger. Like adding support for geocoding parcel data, or placenames, or 
Landmarks, etc

I hope you will support this request to include the address standardizer 
as part of the Postgis code base so it has a home and to make it easier 
for users by releasing it as part of the postgis releases.

I'm happy to work with Regina to make this happen.

Thanks,
   -Steve