[okfn-za] South Africa Street Database

[Adi Eyal]

That's often the problem with using Google services. They all have
strings attached and they're all quite restrictive. You're right
though, Google has some of the best address parsing capabilities
around. I was involved in a project that required to validate tens of
millions of addresses in the US. We used a proprietary system to do
the heavy lifting for us (which in contrast to R500k for the South
African database cost approximately R2k and included many more useful
features). The Google maps algorithms were always generally better
than our tool but unfortunately, were too costly for us to consider
using.

Adi

On 11 February 2012 17:30, Johan Beyers <johan at juizi.com> wrote:
> I just noticed that they do have a restriction in that you have to use this
> in conjunction with a google map, so I assume this is actually for use in
> webapps, mostly.
>
> An interesting perspective on Google vs openstreetmap:
>
> http://blog.nestoria.co.uk/why-and-how-weve-switched-away-from-google-ma
>
> Johan
>
>
> On 11/02/2012 17:25, Johan Beyers wrote:
>>
>> Depending on how many adresses you have, the Google maps api is going to
>> do most of this for you, as a first stab at any rate. It's not open as
>> in a fully available dataset, but it should do what you want. (I did not
>> mention it initially, since it's not really open)
>
>
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-- 
Adi Eyal
Project Manager
phone: +27 78 014 2469
skype: adieyalcas
www.burgercom.co.za