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

SolWuensch

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!

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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

SolWuensch

Have you noticed if any other departments rely heavily on the E911 address data? Who generally notifies your group when there is an error or discrepancy in the data? (the public, other departments, etc.)

JoeBorgione

All I do is 9-1-1 addressing. Enough said....

MichaelKing1

Lets see,

Billing

Genealogy Research

Census

Draft Board

Parole/Probation

Infrastructure Assessment

Publishers Clearinghouse

Etc., Etc., Etc.,

I'm not sure you could ever come up with all the ways we are impacted by the Parcel/Address data that surrounds us, just goes to show, never take your local Assessors office for granted.

TimWitt2

Since I work in E911 and I put the addressing in our GIS it is very important to be accurate. Before a couple of years ago 911 mapping usually looked at street ranges to get addresses, some didn't even consider an address point file. The problem was that if you have a huge parcel a street range address can get you only so far, but with address points you can actually place them directly on the house.

Next generation 911 will move strictly to GIS data, where as before you had GIS and a Master street address guide (MSAG) which was essentially a data base without spatial attributes.

I know this might have been a little bit too much regarding 911 and address points, but I just wanted to show how important GIS is in this area.

TomSellsted

Sol,

Accurate address information is used in several ways at our city. Our 911 services rely on this accuracy to quickly dispatch vehicles to emergency calls. This also adds value after each event. We can use accurate event data to analyze them. We also use accurate addressing in our utility services, permitting and licensing systems.

We use a composite locator. We can address 100 blocks, street centerlines and rooftop addresses. We can also locate by business names.

Regards

Tom

DanPatterson_Retired

Our City underwent amalgamation, a number of years ago, swallowing up 14 other municipalities in the process. This resulted in 12 Main Streets, some with the same address. 911 response was a bit concerned during the several years that it took for the public consultation to agree upon new names and the bickering as to who got to keep the original name. Sometimes civic addresses aren't enough, postal codes are too general, no one understands longitude/latitude and others are just unaware of their surroundings. In the end, all that happened is that taxes went somewhere else, there is only one Main street and everyone refers to the old name when they tell people where they live.

SolWuensch

Here is what I can think of off the top of my head at the moment:

E911 emergency response

Law Enforcement

Delivery Services (USPS)

Disaster Response (This is where the library was)

Transportation services (both public & private)

Taxation & Appraisal (The tax rate is too high over there)

Elections (Where do I vote?)

Waste Disposal services (why didn't they pick up my trash)

Insurance Rates (I'm how far from a fire hydrant!)

Location analysis (using address type and density)

Economic Development

It's similar to asking why place is important, so the short answer is that it's important to everything. As I think about some of the topics I have listed I realize it depends on the attribute data too. Perhaps there is no address type field to show residential, commercial, industrial, etc., in which case the data may be less useful...

ChrisDonohue__GISP

Much as what Blake said, my City uses accurate address data for a wide range of services. Even more so than an Assessor Parcel Number (APN), address data is important, as it more specifically locates things.

For example, a large plot that is in the process of being subdivided into dozens of residential lots will have address locations laid out long before the County approves the new subdivided parcels and creates new APNs. The address locations are important for everyday things like permits and entitlements as development occurs, and for more random but critical things like emergency response should there be an incident in the area.

Chris Donohue, GISP

blake.terhune

Our City government keeps accurate address data for permitting, billing, and emergency response. Our GIS serves as the authority system of record for addresses so all other systems for permitting, work orders, utility billing, emergency response, etc rely on accurate addresses in GIS to perform their particular function well and be compatible with the other integrated systems.

GIS also keeps our addresses as a point feature class, which allows us to build a composite address locator that first uses address point for the most accurate result, then street ranges for the next best guess. The composite address locator is used for various adhoc geocoding operations.

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