Our DOTS Address Validation – International validates addresses in over 250 countries and territories, instantly correcting, standardizing and appending addresses and address information for even the most challenging of address formats.
Service Objects recently completed a major new update for this service that added a large amount of new data, a greatly expanded country support list, more granular results and improved address parsing. Let’s take a look at these service enhancements in more detail.
New Data for Address Validation – International Service
The primary improvement in this new version of Address Validation – International is better data for more countries. We are aggregating additional data sources in order to provide a more complete picture of the addresses of the world. Of course, from country to country, many countries still do not have a consistent postal system – or in some cases any postal system – so no system will ever be perfect. For the most part, we already do a very good job with the more commonly requested countries, like most of the countries in the European Union, Canada, China, Japan and Australia.
We track our resolution levels from Delivery Point Validation to Premise to Street to PostalCode and Locality. With this update, 128 countries gain a one-level bump (such as from Street level resolution to Premise) and 67 countries get a significant bump (e.g. from PostalCode/Locality to Premise). For a complete list of all countries that are supported, as well as their verification levels, please see our Address Validation – International Developer Guide.
Many of the improved countries are in areas like Central and South America and Africa. For example, originally we had Street level data for French Guiana. See the following example:
With the new build, we are now processing French Guiana locations with a maximum verification level of Premise. For example:
Some countries such as Thailand, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, Israel, Romania and even Belgium are among the many countries getting major data upgrades. This address in Belgium was originally limited to a Postcode resolution:
With the new build, we are now returning a Premise level response:
This product had support for most countries and territories previously, but with the new build, we are now servicing a few new countries as well, such as: Norfolk Island, South Sudan, Svalbard and Jan Mayen and others. Also, in the earlier iteration of our service, we had apartment and suite level information for only the United States. In this build, we are adding apartment and suite level data for places like Canada, Denmark, Norway, Australia, South Korea and more.
What other new features are available?
With this update, we are introducing more cascading logic. That is, if we do not know if a house number is valid, we may still return that it is a known street. For example this address:
93A Ossignton Ave, Toronto, ON, M6J 2Z2
This is a valid address in Toronto, ON. We will return a “Valid” at the Premise level for this address:
However, if you tweak the house number so that it is no longer good, we still know that Ossington is a good street, even if the house number is not. In this case, we changed the house number to an invalid 10101, and now return a “Valid” but at a resolution of Street:
If we take things a step further and change Ossington Ave to Fake Ave, we now have an address that is only good to the Locality level.
The service was always built with this sort of functionality in mind, however, in most cases, if we did not have the perfect match, we were not able to share what data points were actually good in the address. For example, St. John St, EC1V 4PH in London, UK returned an Invalid Ambiguous result previously, since it is missing the house number. In the new build, it now returns as Valid at the Street level. This will allow users to access more information than they previously had.
In a future update, we will also be reviewing additional messaging that we can add to allow clients to look for specific conditions they might be interested in.
Other highlights of Address Validation – International
As part of the most recent update, some of our existing features benefit from the additional data sets, including:
- Improved support for local languages in key countries that use alternative language character sets. For example: Cyrillic for Russian addresses, Kanji for Japanese addresses, and Chinese variants for China, Taiwan and Hong Kong among others.
- Over 25,000 Country name variants in Roman and local language character sets.
- Stronger logic for parsing challenging or unconventional address formats in order to return the best results.
Our service continues to support JSON and XML responses for most programming languages, as well as most CRM and marketing automation platforms. With 24/7/365 Customer support, a 99.999% uptime guarantee and dedicated integration support engineers, we are ready to help with any international addressing needs.
Please contact us if you have any questions – we’re always happy to help.
