Spatial Focus News

President Don Jones announces his Retirement

Spatial Focus founding President, Don Jones, has announced his retirement as of the end of 2011. Don came to Spatial Focus following a long career in the GIS industry with AT&T and American Cadastre (AmCad). He brought a wealth of business acumen and industry knowledge to Spatial Focus. We wish Don and his family well in retirement. Martha McCart Wells becomes President, and Sara Yurman takes on the role of Treasurer of the company with Don's retirement.

CAP Grant Project Under Way at Spatial Focus

Spatial Focus was awarded a CAP Grant by FGDC to work on tools associated with implementing the new Address Standard. Sara Yurman, GISP and Carl Anderson, GISP, are working on tools to make the Standard searchable using a HTML5 protocol, as well as tools to help bring local address data into the XML data structure for export and import. These tools are being prototyped with grant funds, and will be publicly available through FGDC at the conclusion of the grant. Additionally, Martha Wells, GISP, is coordinating with the State of Louisiana's CAP Grant program to conduct training on the Standard for State and local officials in Louisiana in February, 2012.

Spatial Focus starts new Addressing Project with St. Louis County, MN

Spatial Focus was recently awarded a contract for development of an address repository from St. Louis County, MN. Here's a picture of our Address Team in their new St. Louis County Sheriff's K-9 Team Shirts.

Left to Right: Ken Denson, Matt Yurman, Sara Yurman, Bob Watkins, and John Cargile

Address Data Standard Endorsed by FGDC

With great pleasure, the Address Standard Working Group of URISA International (Martha Wells, Sara Yurman, Carl Anderson, Ed Wells, and Hilary Perkins) announces the endorsement of the United States Thoroughfare, Landmark and Postal Address Data Standard on February 10, 2011. The Federal Geographic Data Committee Steering Committee voted overwhelmingly to endorse the Standard. Spatial Focus staff had a huge role in the development of the Standard, and the geospatial community, through URISA, NENA, and other organizations contributed enormously to our understanding of address data and addressing practices throughout the United States. We want to thank everyone who had a role in the development of the Standard, and especially want to thank our champions and biggest supporters, Randy Fusaro and Anne O'Connor, of the United States Census, and Julie Binder Maitra at FGDC who helped us with the formal endorsement process.

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 final Draft Standard was submitted in November 2010.

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 SQL code examples 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 primarly author of the Data Quality section. Carl Anderson, Senior GIS Specialist at Spatial Focus, authored the Data Exchange section. Other co-chairs are Hilary Perkins (East-West Gateway Council of Governments, St. Louis, MO), Administrative and Introduction Sections, and Ed Wells (Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority, Washington, DC), Data Classification. Over 500 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.

For further information, or to review the public comment version, please visit www.urisa.org/about/initiatives/addressstandard.

Carl Anderson, GISP, Joins Spatial Focus

Spatial Focus is pleased to announce that Carl Anderson, formerly GIS Manager for Fulton County, GA, has joined Spatial Focus. Carl is on a long-term assignment with the Census Bureau helping revise some of the geocoding algorithms used in analyzing economic data. He is commuting between Washington DC and Atlanta. Carl brings a wealth of knowledge to Spatial Focus. He is the author of the XML definitional document (XSD) for the FGDC Standard, and teaches both the Addressing and Open Source Workshops for URISA. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of URISA, and an instructor at the URISA Leadership Academy. Carl has over 20 years of experience in various aspects of GIS and data management.