Address Guidelines for Canada

Enterprise Geocoding offers several CAN databases including HERE point databases and the streets and point databases. Contact your sales representative for more information about licensing these databases. Your Enterprise Geocoding database release notes identify the current database vintages.

Follow these suggestions to ensure that your street input data is in the best format possible for optimum geocoding.

Postal box addresses—Geocode Address Global for Canada can geocode to addresses containing either a PO Box for English-speaking provinces or a CP (Case Postale) for French-speaking provinces. Some spelling variations of PO Box are supported. A successful match returns a result code of B2 along with the output format that is standardized according to Canadian address formats. If your data contains both a street and PO Box, you can set the priority of PO Box matching over streets in a preference in Management Console.
Highway addresses—Highway addresses (such as Hwy 401) are geocodable.
House numbers and apartment letters—Remove spaces between house number and apartment letter. 123 A Main Street does not geocode correctly because the geocoder assumes that the name of the street is A. Two workaround options are available:
Do not include the apartment letter.
Delete the space between house number and apartment letter: 123A Main Street geocodes because the geocoder ignores the A.
House numbers and unit information—The house number pinpoints the location of the address. Unit input can be in one of two formats, as shown in the following examples:
99-123 Main St, where 99 is the unit number. In this format, do not specify the unit type. The number 99 could be a suite, apartment, unit, floor or any valid unit type.
123 Main St. Apt 99, where Apt is the unit type and 99 is the unit number. In this format, you must specify a valid unit type (such as Apt or Suite), otherwise the address will not be geocoded correctly.
Directional suffixes—Use directional suffixes wherever possible. This is especially true in towns and cities, such as Calgary, which consist mainly of numbered streets. These streets can only be distinguished by their directional suffixes and street types. They also distinguish addresses on streets that change direction. For example: 123 Main St W and 123 Main St E have very different coordinates.
Street types—These distinguish different streets of the same name. For example, Main Avenue and Main Street are two entirely different entities. Using types is not essential, but it adds precision to your data. For a list of valid street types see www.canadapost.ca.
City name—Do not abbreviate city names. If the city is unknown, you may leave it blank, although this may affect the accuracy of the geocode.
Province name—You may use the full province name (for example, Ontario), but using the two-character abbreviation (ON) is recommended to reduce the likelihood of input errors. Province is an optional input value, as of Spectrum version 12.0. It is not necessary when you are geocoding to the street level, or when falling back to a geographic centroid.