Address Audits

The UK suffers from a lack of a common, definitive address list; a plethora exist and many attempts have been made over the years to standardise and consolidate these lists. The most recent attempt has been the National Spatial Address Infrastructure (NSAI) which stalled in 2006 due to no agreement being reached over the financial arrangements related to IPR.

As a result of this lack of joined-up addressing, many organisations have very different versions of the same address textually, have located these addresses differently (often by miles!) and have variations in the scope and completeness of the addresses contained.

Manchester Geomatics have developed a suite of tests to audit the quality of address lists, most commonly Local Land and Property Gazetteers (LLPG's). These tests are called AQuA - Address Quality Audit and can be used to benchmark and improve the quality of your organisations address list. The benefits of this can be enormous and are likely to result in significant efficiency savings in your organisation as well as a much more robust address register.

Broadly, our algorithms will identify logical inconsistencies in your address lists in the following four ways:

• The textual content and structure of the address.
• The physical location of the address
• The relationships between addresses including number range ordering along streets and the “parent-child” relationships between addresses. These tests are currently particularly relevant to authorities working towards the new BS7666:2006 standards.
• The relationship between addresses and other classes of spatial objects, such as buildings and streets, using Ordnance Survey products, such as the MasterMap Topopraphic and Integrated Traffic Network (ITN) layers.

Critically, these algorithms test the addresses in ways that are far beyond existing address matching products and spatial data quality assurance products. We have successfully run these tests on data provided by several authorities as discussed further in the case studies.

We have tailored the output from these tests so that the solutions to the anomalies identified can be incorporated into your original address list with the minimum effort.

MGL have used the tests in these audits to help Ordnance Survey improve the quality of their addressing data products. We are also working with several local authorities to help them to improve the quality of their LLPG's. Read more about how effective these audits have been in the Location case studies.

Please read more about AQuA.

Please contact Ed Scrase for more information.