[RouterGeocoder] Re: [Pagc-devel] Comments re. Requirements
outlined on OSGeo
(Orkney)Toru Mori
moritoru at orkney.co.jp
Thu Nov 27 23:20:16 EST 2008
Dan,
Thank you very much for referring Japanese postal address system.
As project owner of Japanese geocoder (geocoder.ja is part of PostLBS
http://www.postlbs.org/ ), I want to make my comments on your post.
Yes, you are partially right. The reality gets much complicated. We have 3
types of address systems and we use 3 types (at least) of Characters sets
in writing postal address. We do not use street network in geocoding at
all. They are totally separated.
There are proprietary/opensource geocoding software and web services in
Japan. They consist of two processes, text normalization and matching with
address point data (over 30 millions points). Since inputted address text
may use different characters set and/or way of abbreviation, all the
address data will be normalized first. This process plays say over 60% of
total process. Then matching process starts. This can be even done by
usual database software.
My purpose in this post to everybody is not to describe how Japanese
address system is complicated, but want to tell everybody lives in "non-
Asian entity" that even a smart software cannot always handle geocoding
and routing at a time. We should not forget that almost 60% of world
population is in Asia.
Mori
> > Once you move to Asian countries, things get complicated. We know that
> > in Japan house numbers along a street are assigned chronologically
> > rather than spatially, as a result the standard algorithms for
> > locating
> > an address along a blockface breakdown. What is in PAGC (starting with
> > v0.1.4) that could be the basis for a geocoder in Japan (and perhaps
> > other Asian countries) is the parcel geocoder that is now part of
> > PAGC.
> > However, whether this would work as a solution is largely
> > speculation on
> > my part, and could well be wrong.
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