GeoNames Forum

Hi all , is anyone aware of any open source / free software / web services providing quality address validation ?
A commercial example is : http://www.addressdoctor.com

I am part way into setting one up , and am interested in the efforts of others.

Hi bhaguan

I don't believe it is possible to provide open source address validation. The data required to do this is far too expensive and comes with a lot of licence restrictions.

Regards

Marc

Not possible !
Never.
All it takes is someone stubbern enough, thats me

.
I in fact already have a substantial portion of the required dataset to provide a fairly comprehensive package for Australia , and the US, the main problem I am having is that I simply dont have the time I need to get/decifer/extract the postal code information for every country on an individual basis.
I have found the raw datasets for many countries, but of cource every one of them is in a completely different format. This is why I was hoping to have a look at the current geonames.org postal code dataset, I figured youve already been there, and it would save me the efort , at least for whatever countries you have postal code info for, of standardising all these datasets.

DOUP. ^^ that was me , forgot to log on.

Hi,

the required information is available for some countries.. For the US, for instance :
http://geocoder.us/

This Perl script uses the TIGER dataset (more information on this website).. And too bad for the poor of us who live in countries that do not provide data for free.....

Sami Dalouche

Just a question, though -

Are you looking for address geocoding, or zip code to city translation ? If you only care about zipcode, then the geonames zip code data is a starting dataset.

However, there isn't any mapping between geonames city's IDs and geonames zip codes, but I am planning to work on that (probably using a combination of GIS lat/long distance matching + fuzzy matching) whenever I have time (might be this week, next week, or later....). I'll sure share the resulting dataset with geonames users, once I get something to work

Regards,
Sami Dalouche