Why is accurate address data important? What is the most important reason for maintaining complete & accurate address datasets?

[Sol_Wuensch]

Very broad question here... I would like to hear from the community about all the things you can think of where address data is important, especially public services or government services.   Obviously there is no right or wrong answer, any thoughtful responses would be appreciated.  Thanks in advance!

[JoeBorgione]

I work in two different 9-1-1 call centers as a contract employee so I don't have interaction with other governmental departments.  However, the way we work it at one center is I maintain a SDE with streets and now address points feature classes.  All the cities that we serve have access (the GIS people) to the sde.  If we have a problem in City A with an address, that GIS person gets a notification to fix it.

What's really cool about that particular set up is that many of the cities replicate the data down to their own SDE and use it the way they need to.  The streets feature class is regarded as "the" centerlines data for the county.

The other center is a little bit behind the first one; I do maintain the centerlines in a similar fashion, but the only entity I deal directly with is the County GIS department.

[TomSellsted]

Sol,

I wouldn't say rely from our perspective.  I would say "benefit".  We have been scrutinizing our address data for a long time and no one provides more accurate, immediate feedback than our public safety folks.

The other departments benefit from having much more accurate data.  This is not to say that we don't get feedback from other departments too, just much less.

Regards,

Tom

[TimWitt2]

In our county, everybody uses my address data, even some cities request my data,

Some departments sometimes contact me if they see an issue, but primarily our dispatchers let me know when something is off.

[JoeBorgione]

That's the thing about 9-1-1 and address data; it gets qa'd / qc'd all day long.  The two psaps I contract to are #1 and  #4 in the state of Utah in terms of call volume; typically the dispatchers let me know pretty quickly when an address does not resolve.

[TimothyHales]

All good examples provided so far. In my pre-Esri life I used to work for a public school planning department. We didn't do transportation routing (although very important), but we did do enrollment forecasting, attendance boundaries, and new school site selections. Having accurate addresses allowed us to properly geocode our students. If they are not accurately placed, then it could easily cause our recommendations to the board of education to be off. Overcrowded schools and new schools being under-utilized do not sit very well with the public.

We got most of our data from the county GIS department, but many times we would drive the new developments to collect our own data because they tend to be several months behind. Of course with the new geocode services Esri provides, I am sure it is less of an issue now.

[TimothyHales]

Sol Wuensch​ It appears that the Jive system marked it as assumed answered based upon the fact that multiple replies had been marked as helpful. Although this should just be a discussion and not a question. A little workaround for this issue is to mark a reply as answered, and then unmark that reply. It turned the discussion back to unanswered.