Customer Service Excellence is one of Service Objects’ core values, which we support in a number of ways, including creating a variety of technical content. Our engineers regularly contribute to our blog to help organizations implement data quality solutions and stay on top of trends. Many of our blogs continue to attract attention far after publication.
Here are 5 of our most popular technical articles to date, click through to read more.
Geocoding resolution – ensuring accuracy and precision
When geocoding addresses, coordinate precision is not as important as coordinate accuracy. It is a common misconception to confuse high precision decimal degree coordinates with high accuracy. Precision is important, but having a long decimal coordinate for the wrong area could be damaging. It is more important to ensure that the coordinates point to the correct location for the given area. Accurately geocoding an address is very complex. If the address is at all ambiguous or not properly formatted then a geocoding system may incorrectly return a coordinate for a location on the wrong side of town or for a similar looking address in an entirely different state or region. Read More
How to identify incorporated and unincorporated places in the united states
The US Census Bureau uses the term “place” to refer to an area associated with a concentrated population, such as a municipality, city, town, village or community. These statistical areas have a defined boundary and they may or may not have a legal administration that performs some level of government function. The US Census Bureau uses class codes to classify different types of places and areas. The Bureau currently lists 70 different codes; however, all places are either a legally incorporated place or a Census Designated Place. Read More
Looking beyond simple blacklists to identify malicious ip addresses
Using a blacklist to block malicious users and bots that would cause you aggravation and harm is one of the most common and oldest methods around (according to Wikipedia the first DNS based blacklist was introduced in 1997). There are various types of blacklists available. Blacklists exist for IP addresses, domains, email addresses and user names. The majority of the time these lists will concentrate on identifying known spammers. Other lists will serve a more specific purpose, such as IP lists that help identify known proxies, TORs and VPNs or email lists of known honey pots or lists of disposable domains. Read More
Catch-all domains explained
Imagine launching an online business and associating your email address with your business domain. For example purposes, let’s say your domain is XYZ.com and your name is John. Your email address would be john@XYZ.com. Now what if someone entered jon@XYZ.com? If you had a “catch-all” domain, you’d receive email messages sent to ____@XYZ.com — even if senders misspelled your name. In fact, that was originally part of the allure of catch-all email addresses. With a catch-all domain, you could tell people to send email to anything at your designated domain such as: sales@, info@, bobbymcgee@, or mydogspot@. No matter what they entered in front of the @ sign, you’d still get the message without having to configure your server or do anything special. Read More
Can Google Maps be used to validate addresses?
In November of 2016, Google started rolling out updates to more clearly distinguish their Geocoding and Places APIs, both of which are a part of the Google Maps API suite. The Places API was introduced in March 2015 as a way for users to search for places in general and not just addresses. Until recently the Geocoding API functioned similarly to Places in that it also accepted incomplete and ambiguous queries to explore locations, but now it is focusing more on returning better geocoding matches for complete and unambiguous postal addresses. Do these changes mean that Google Maps and its Geocoding API can finally be used as an address validation service? Read More
Our most popular blogs have one thing in common: they offer insight to help your team leverage data quality to enhance your business practices. View all of our blog content or reach out to let us know what you’d like to see more of.
