2 posts tagged with "gazetteer"

Open the demo, type an address in Kabul, and watch nothing happen. Not a wrong pin a few streets off. Not a city-center fallback. Nothing — the gazetteer has never heard of the place. Try Hong Kong. Try Tirana, or Chişinău, or anywhere in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Same silence. We had been calling this gazetteer "world coverage" for weeks, and it covered 97 of the world's ~195 countries. The other ninety-odd were simply not in the file.

Overnight I taught the geocoder Canada. Or I thought I did. I pulled 843,000 Canadian postal codes, computed a centroid for every one, spot-checked the result — M5H 2N2, downtown Toronto, 43.652, −79.382, dead on — and validated the database every way I could read it: every postcode present, every coordinate right, nothing else disturbed. Green, top to bottom. This morning, before flipping it live, I asked the demo to find a Toronto address. It dropped the pin in Ohio.

So, the questions for the morning. How does a database that passes every check still land the answer 600 kilometres wrong? What does it actually mean to "validate" a thing? And why is Toronto in Ohio?