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by thampiman 4098 days ago
Very cool project. Out of curiosity, how do you test the validity of the addresses?
1 comments

All of the addresses come from "authoritative" datasets (i.e. from local or state governments) so we're assuming them to be correct.
Interesting project!

I assume you don't have a manual procedure to report and correct individual addresses that are in error, and the trick would be to contact the agency that provided the erroneous dataset, is that right?

It would be useful to have a way to find out "where did the data for this location come from, and who do I contact to correct it?"

For example, our house doesn't have an outline on your sample map, although there is a red dot there. Our street address shows up on the house next door, and the neighboring houses in that direction are shifted similarly.

Most other online maps for our location have the same error or similar. I think the confusion happened because we are on a corner and some years ago a previous owner changed our street address from one street to the other. So whatever agency maintains this data goofed something up in the process.

If there were an easy way to find out who this mystery agency is, then I could help them sort out this mixup. :-)

It isn't really user friendly, but I would say it is fairly easy to find what information they are using by looking at the source files:

https://github.com/openaddresses/openaddresses/tree/master/s...

(In the US the data might come from someone who accepts updates from someone else, but it is usually the state, county or city