Introduction

DOTS Address Geocode – US is a publicly available XML and JSON web service that provides latitude/longitude and metadata information about a physical US address. The service provides geocoding information, such as the latitude and longitude location of a US address, along with demographic information, such as the census tract, block and other metadata.

DOTS Address Geocode – US can help provide instant address locations to websites or enhancement to contact lists.

NOTE: The DOTS Address Geocode web service has recently been updated, and as such some of the older operations have been deprecated.  If you are still currently using the older operations of the service, you can refer to the developer’s guide below for information concerning integration, inputs and outputs for the deprecated operations.

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Developer Guide Map

  • Operations
    This section lists the DOTS Address Geocode – US operations and goes into the details behind the inputs and outputs.
    Operations:
  • Codes
    This section shows additional supporting data tables for the DPV and Correction code values returned by DOTS Address Geocode – US operations.
  • Errors
    This section reflects details on the error outputs that can happen with the service.
  • Code Snippets and Sample Code
    Here you’ll find code snippets for various programming languages and frameworks along with links to our sample code page on the web site.
  • Try The API
    This is where you’ll go to take the API for a spin.  There you can test our recommended operation GetBestMatch_V4.
  • Service Reference
    In this section, you’ll find all the different endpoints supported by this service, input and output schema information as well as an opportunity to try the other endpoints as well.
  • Frequently Asked Questions
    This is a list of some of the questions we hear more often that you can reference and get answers on right away.

Integration Basics

Integrating DOTS Address Geocode – US into your application should be easy and straightforward. If you are using a common platform, Service Objects may already have sample code built that you can use:

https://www.serviceobjects.com/developers/sample-code/

However, if you are using a common platform that does not already have sample code, you can ask Service Objects to build you an example. Email support@serviceobjects.com for more details.


Web Service Structure:

Web services are methods that integrate with other applications via the web, and encapsulate complex business logic. Web services are too large a topic to cover in this document, but Service Objects has developed its web services to be as easy to integrate and as accessible as possible. DOTS Address Geocode – US is a public XML web service that supports SOAP, POST and GET operations.


The host path, or physical location of the web service is here: https:/trial.serviceobjects.com/GCR/


The location of the WSDL, or Web Service Definition Language document, is here (This is also accessible via the “Service Definition” link.): https://trial.serviceobjects.com/gcr/soap.svc?wsdl

Service XML Request Help Page

https://trial.serviceobjects.com/gcr/api.svc/xml/help

Service JSON Request Help Page

https://trial.serviceobjects.com/gcr/api.svc/json/help

Important Notes!

  1. This XML is the definition of the web service, meaning its inputs, outputs, operations, and the like.  Most likely, you will have another tool read this WSDL and make the operations available to you in your application.  Whenever your utilities or IDE asks for a WSDL path to DOTS Address Geocode – US, you can provide this one.
  2. SOAP is done via POST, only with special XML markup in the post-body.

Every web service has operations that it offers to subscribers – methods that do different work and return different output. Examining the link above, you will notice several of these operations available, which are described in detail later on.