12 January 2021 
#404: quantum of sollazzo – The data newsletter by @puntofisso
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This week brings you a few cosmetic changes to the newsletter. Let me know what you think. Everything else has been relatively hectic – I had a very busy week at work, where I had a deep dive into the projects we funded through our AI Skunkworks Dragons' Den competition. Stay tuned if you're into AI, as we'll be publishing more details soon.

Look below for some sponsored geotastic content – Ed Freyfogle, who's the organiser of location-based service meetup Geomob, co-host of the Geomob podcast, and co-founder of the OpenCage Geocoder, has offered to introduce a set of points around the topic of geodata. His second entry on why addresses can be a nightmare starts a few paragraphs below.
 

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--- Sponsored content by Open Cage ---

Addresses, and why they can be a nightmare.

In part three of our series on geocoding we look at the challenge of addresses and their many different formats.

Good news: Open, global datasets like OpenStreetMap make getting lots geodata easier than ever.

Bad news: Now you have to sort through it, which can be an i18n nightmare.

Example: Given this geodata for a location in Spain - what address would a normal person expect?

"components": {
    "ISO_3166-1_alpha-2": "ES",
    "ISO_3166-1_alpha-3": "ESP",
    "_type": "building",
    "city": "Barcelona",
    "city_district": "Sarrià - Sant Gervasi",
    "country": "España",
    "country_code": "es",
    "county": "Barcelona",
    "county_code": "B",
    "house_number": "68",
    "political_union": "European Union",
    "postcode": "08017",
    "road": "Carrer de Calatrava",
    "state": "Cataluña",
    "state_code": "CT",
    "suburb": "les Tres Torres"
},

At OpenCage we’ve open-sourced the templates we use to convert address data into well formatted strings for almost 250 territories around the world, so we know the correct answer is Carrer de Calatrava, 68, 08017 Barcelona, España. This is just one of many small steps we’ve taken to make developer’s lives easier.

Anyone looking for an entertaining view of the technical complexity of addresses should read “Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses”. Meanwhile, in the category of not sure whether to laugh or cry, we have last year's news of the German town that voted “no” to adopting street names.

If your project calls for well-formatted addresses, give the OpenCage geocoding API a try.