Introduction

DOTS Address Insight (“AIN”) is a publicly available XML web service that provides comprehensive address validation, location identification and appends demographic metadata information about a location in the US. The service provides validated, standardized and parsed address information, geocoding information, demographics information and other useful insights about an address in the United States. A Status score is returned giving users an indication of how likely it is that the location exists especially useful for those out of the way rural addresses that may be hard to identify with a normal USPS database.

Address Insight can provide instant address validation/geocoding data to websites or enhancement to contact lists. The extensive demographic statistics help you identify and enhance your service to your best customers.

Resources

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Sample Code

View sample code in PHP, JAVA, C# and other supported protocols and languages.

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Sample Data

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Quick Lookups

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Developer Guide Map

  • Operations
    This section lists the DOTS Address Insight operations and goes into the details behind the inputs and outputs. 
    Operations
  • DPV and Correction Codes
    This section shows additional supporting data tables for the DPV and Correction code values returned by DOTS Address Insight operations.
  • Address, Geocode and Zip Note Codes
    This section shows additional supporting data tables for the note codes returned by DOTS Address Insight operations.
  • ClassFP and CityType Codes
    This section shows additional supporting data tables for the ClassFP and CityType codes returned by the service.
  • 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 GetAddressInsight.
  • 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 AIN 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 tricky business logic.  Web services are too large of 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.

AIN is a public XML web service that supports SOAP, POST and GET operations, using RESTful paradigms or simple HTTP transport calls.


A test page for the recommended operation can be found here:

AIUS – Try The API


See the service references and try the other operations here:

AIUS – Service Reference


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/AIN/soap.svc?wsdl

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 Address Insight, 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.