Spatial Focus News

Spatial Focus Principals Co-Chair Address Standards Working Group for URISA

Martha Wells and Sara Yurman are two of the five co-chairs of the Address Standards Working Group for URISA International. URISA successfully petitioned the Federal Geographic Data Committee to take over the development of a Street Address Data Standard. The efforts began in April of 2005, and the first draft was published in August of 2005, and a second draft in December 2005. The Committee is now working on final editing and responding to the comments received from addressing experts all over the U.S. and Canada.

The standard has an introduction and four main parts. The first part, Data Content, defines the elements of an address, and the attributes of an address. There are 70 elements and attributes defined in this section. These include address numbers, street name elements, place name elements, subaddress elements, and attributes describing the status, type, physical location, jurisdictional authority, valid dates, and other information about addresses. A third section defines the Address Reference System used to assign and validate addresses within a given area. The second part, Classification, describes the ways in which the elements are combined into specific syntaxes as complete addresses. These include thoroughfare addresses (related to a street, path, rail or waterway), landmark addresses (identified by a commonly known name), postal addresses (such as PO Boxes and rural routes), and a general class for those with unknown types. The third part, Data Quality, provides a description of, and pseudocode for, testing each element within an address. The fourth part, Data Exchange, provides an XML data structure for the exchange/transfer of data between organizations. Ms. Wells was the primary author of the Content section, and Ms. Yurman was the primary author of the Data Quality section. Other co-chairs are Hilary Perkins (East-West Gateway Council of Governments, St. Louis, MO), Administrative and Introduction Sections, Ed Wells (Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority, Washington, DC), Data Classification, and Carl Anderson (Fulton County, GA GIS Manager, Atlanta, GA), Data Exchange. Over 400 people participated in the discussions and preparation of the drafts, using a Twiki-based interactive website. FGDC's Steering Committee has praised the Committee for its process which has been very open and inclusive.

The final draft, along with all comments received and responses to the comments, will be transmitted to FGDC in 2010. FGDC will review the draft, and will put it out for public review and comment according to their standard process.

For further information, or to review the second draft version, please visit www.urisa.org