Posted by Joel Shepherd on 06/20/07 05:09

In article <1182273988.111843.324250@g4g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>,
vunet.us@gmail.com wrote:

> On Jun 19, 12:56 pm, "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorp...@cs.tut.fi> wrote:
> >
> > Any [street address] checks have the risk of rejecting correct data.

Bingo.

> What if I use google map to determine a valid address? I'd get HTML of
> the map page with user-supplied 'loc' string and if google does not
> find it (will contain string "No match found" inside) I will alert the
> user of a wrong address entered...?

Here's the difficulty: new addresses are being created all the time, and
old addresses are being destroyed daily. No address verification system
is going to stay perfectly current and correct. So, the most you can
hope for is an estimate of a street address's correctness. I.e., if
you're dealing with a customer/visitor interactively, an address
verification service allows you to (in essence) ask the visitor "Is this
[insert service-provided address here] the address you mean?", or "Is
the address you want in this [list of street addresses]?". It cannot
tell you with certainty whether a given address is valid or not.
Ultimately, you need to rely on the customer/visitor's judgment for that.

A corollary is that using an address verification service to
automatically (i.e., with no human verification) validate and correct
addresses is dangerous.

All that said, you _can_ use Google to search for "address verification
software" and that might give you some guidance to what's out there.

--
Joel.

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