Articles about geocoding — the process of turning parsed addresses into lat/lon coordinates.
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Our neural address parser passes 20.7% of our test suite. The rule-based parser it's meant to replace passes 93.7%. By that scoreboard, we should delete the neural model and go home.
We shipped the neural model instead. Here's why both numbers are true — and why the one that matters says the opposite.
Mailwoman is an open-source address parser + geocoder that uses Who's On First as its gazetteer. This post is a practical reference on WOF's gotchas and the tooling we built to work around them. Try the demo or see what ships today.
Who's On First is the best open gazetteer we have. It's also one of the strangest datasets you'll encounter as a developer. This post is about what makes it hard to use, what makes it worth the effort, and the tooling we built inside Mailwoman to tame it.
If you've ever tried to answer "what city is this address in?" programmatically, using open data without paying a geocoding API, you've probably already run into WOF. And you probably had some questions.