If you work with street addresses and are dismayed by the lack of a useful address standard, you will be pleased to know that a draft standard has recently been released for review and comment by the Urban & Regional Information Systems Association (URISA). The URISA street address standards work is an effort approved by the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC).
Street addresses are location identifiers used in a variety of mapping and GIS applications. Generally, street addresses have been created over a long period of time under the control of thousands of state and local jurisdictions using hundreds of different ways to store and distribute the information. In an attempt to reign-in and organize some of the chaos surrounding street addresses, in the spring of this year the FGDC accepted a proposal from URISA to build a street address standard. Following acceptance by the FGDC, URISA selected a team of six professionals to develop a draft standard.
The work of the six-member team is now available for your review through a web-based comment form accessible on the URISA site.
The standard consists of five major components: Introductory Materials, Street Address Data Content, Street Address Data Classification, Street Address Data Quality, and Street Address Data Exchange. The comment period for this version of the draft ends on October 3, 2005. A second comment period will open in mid-October following the URISA Annual Conference in Kansas City, MO. When the rigorous review period is completed, FGDC will evaluate the standard with the intent that it will become a national standard.