Definition
Address standardization refers to the process of taking an address and formatting it in a consistent and standardized way for storage and analysis purposes. This process ensures that addresses are represented uniformly and accurately across a geographic information system (GIS).
Here are the components used in address standardization:
• Country: The full country name (or an international code) should be specified
• Street address: The full street address should be specified
• City: The city name should be specified
• State or Province: The two-letter state or province code should be specified
• Postal Code: The postal code should be specified
To demonstrate the effectiveness of address standardization in GIS, we can consider LocationIQ's geocoding API and the supported parameters. The standard address elements listed here can sometimes be too much if you're only looking at a predefined standard structure. Address normalization can be performed via an additional parameter to return responses within a standard set of address elements. This would significantly reduce the complexity of parsing API queries, and save developer time.
