HOW DO YOU BUILD A CITY'S ADDRESS SYSTEM?
A typical address system is built from three spatial data components: -
1. Address No. which could be digits from a unique parcel identifier like a
parcel/plot number,
2. Address/name of street eg, Mpaka Rd, Westland Close, Agha khan
walk, moi drive, etc,
3. Type of street on which the property is accessed eg a close-CL, drive-
DR, road-RD, avenue-AV, trail-TR, highway-HW, etc,
4. The abbreviation of the neighborhood eg Riverside RS, Westlands WL,
Thome TH, Umoja as UM, etc
Merging these four datasets creates a unique address system for each parcel
and the properties within them.
For instance, Jacaranda Hotel whose legal parcel ID is BLOCK 7/268 can
correctly be addressed as 268 Pio Gama Pinto Rd WL, and Pride In Hotels
whose parcel ID is 209/76/1 as 1 Westlands Close WL.
In Python geopandas or plain sweet vanilla JavaScript, you can build a script
to capture the last three indices of parcel IDs and concatenate these four
spatial components to rapidly automate this process crunching these tasks in
a mere day or less.
At all levels of government, addresses are the foundation for more efficient
and effective governance. They provide a civic identity to citizens, and a
reliable means to locate and serve all residents within a local authority.
GIS and robust relational databases allow the design and maintenance of a
more standardized street data repository from which not only governments
benefit, but also the citizens who have a place within the system of
addresses.
