Georgia Geospatial Conference

1:30pm-2:15pm
"The FGDC Address Standard in the Real World": Sara Yurman
Addresses can be the heart of an effective GIS program. Unfortunately, addresses are some of the most difficult data to collect and maintain, due to wide variations in syntax, abbreviations and punctuation. Placenames, subaddresses, street name variations and just plain confusion about where something is located create a cloud of complication.

The FGDC Address Standard has been used to organize master address repositories at both the local and state levels. Originally conceived as a transfer standard, the Address Standard is constructed to enable local governments throughout the U.S. and its territories to record and manage addresses with all their local intelligence intact. Addresses with PLSS prefixes, addresses requiring multiple city names, addresses that reference an "urbanization" rather than a street, all variety of U.S. addresses are included in its terminology. The completeness of its treatment of addresses has led to its role in organizing databases. As the only address standard that incorporates address data quality control, it has been helpful in cleaning and maintaining the data in them.

This paper will review the FGDC Address Standard, its use at the state and local levels, and its place in the current national conversation about addresses.

2:15pm-3:00pm
"Standardized Quality Control, Creating a Sustainable Quality Control Environment" Zachary Lancaster & Charles Shapiro
Quality control lays the foundation for trust in your address database. Address data are prone to small errors and mistakes that can aggregate over time and when taken together can reduce the usability of your address data. This fact underlies the importance of doing proper and exhaustive quality control on address data. The FGDC standard provides a basis for this QC process. This set of processes is complex and applying it to each data set seems to require that each data set be treated uniquely. This assumption can lead to the development of individualized methods for testing each element which is both time consuming and lead to inadvertently checking the wrong pieces of data.

To correct this the development of a standardized set of QA/QC checks. By understanding what needs to be checked each time it is possible to easily create and maintain tools for quickly and correctly assessing and reporting on the quality of data. This presentation will describe the QA/QC process and discuss the creation of transparent workflows that can be used to create better data that accounts for all elements.