What is the name of that block?

Fascinating discussion about looking at things differently. The data management scoop on this one is that today I learned that in Japan they don't identify locations by street address as we do here in the US and in Europe, they identify locations by blocks, just a different way to look at things.


I haven't had the opportunity to cleanse address data from Japan (most of my experience thus far has been with US addresses), but I'm sure my friend Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen has!

Until next time...Rich

Comments

Unknown said…
Hi, my friend Rich.

I actually haven’t cleansed Japanese addresses, but I have made a match engine for world wide business entities, where customer master data is matched against the D&B Worldbase.

In this solution we have to deal with the fact that some addresses are cleansed and some aren’t. Therefore we use both hard matching rules based on standardisation and more fuzzy processing – both for candidate selection and similarity assignment. And sure, the Japanese addresses had a special tuning session in that implementation.
Unknown said…
Having jap family, I know the nightmare it is when you have to visit a friend for the first time... You usually ask at the local district police-station (quite every corner) or ask your friend to pick you up at the nearest train or bus station :)

Even if the block numbers are quite stables in the time (as the streets are), house numbers are also setup differently (it would be too easy otherwise) since newer houses have a hight house-number... In a timelime, you could live int he same block, in the same geographical coords but not in the same house-number!

And I let you imagine what makes a new street in the middle of an existing block on its number...

Some services should propose already good address standardization, as Henrik said, but I am wondering how efficient are address-validation services...
Mike O'Connor said…
Doubly interesting/complex problem too depending on whether the data is in ASCII or Double-Byte Unicode. Or even harder, if both charsets are present. You'll want to avoid having to transliterate at all costs.
Ken said…
Rich,

Fascinating!
Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

Given the Global village we now live in, we all need to learn more about the diversity out there.

I'll leave the address matching issues to the experts !

Ken