ValidateAddressGlobal

ValidateAddressGlobal provides enhanced address standardization and validation for addresses outside the U.S. and Canada. ValidateAddressGlobal can also validate addresses in the U.S. and Canada but its strength is validation of addresses in other countries. If you process a significant number of addresses outside the U.S. and Canada, you should consider using ValidateAddressGlobal.

ValidateAddressGlobal is part of the Universal Addressing Module.

ValidateAddressGlobal performs several steps to achieve a quality address, including transliteration, parsing, validation, and formatting.

Character Set Mapping and Transliteration

ValidateAddressGlobal handles international strings and their complexities. It uses fully Unicode enabled string processing which enables the transliteration of non-roman characters into the Latin character set and mapping between different character sets.

Character set mapping and transliteration features include:

  • Support for over 30 different character sets including UTF-8, ISO 8859-1, GBK, BIG5, JIS, EBCDIC
  • Proper "elimination" of diacritics according to language rules
  • Transliteration for various alphabets into Latin Script
  • Greek (BGN/PCGN 1962, ISO 843 - 1997)
  • Cyrillic (BGN/PCGN 1947, ISO 9 - 1995)
  • Hebrew
  • Japanese Katakana, Hiragana and Kanji
  • Chinese Pinyin (Mandarin, Cantonese)
  • Korean Hangul

Address Parsing, Formatting, and Standardization

Restructuring incorrectly fielded address data is a complex and difficult task especially when done for international addresses. People introduce many ambiguities as they enter address data into computer systems. Among the problems are misplaced elements (such as company or personal names in street address fields) or varying abbreviations that are not only language, but also country specific. ValidateAddressGlobal identifies address elements in address lines and assigns them to the proper fields. This is an important precursor to the actual validation. Without restructuring, "no match" situations might result.

Properly identified address elements are also important when addresses have to be truncated or shortened to fit specific field length requirements. With the proper information in the right fields, specific truncation rules can be applied.

  • Parses and analyzes address lines and identifies individual address elements
  • Processes over 30 different character sets
  • Formats addresses according to the postal rules of the country of destination
  • Standardizes address elements (such as changing AVENUE to AVE)

Global Address Validation

Address validation is the correction process where properly parsed address data is compared against reference databases supplied by postal organizations or other data providers. ValidateAddressGlobal validates individual address elements to check for correctness using sophisticated fuzzy matching technology and produces standardized and formatted output based on postal standards and user preferences. FastCompletion validation type can be used in quick address entry applications. It allows input of truncated data in several address fields and generates suggestions based on this input.

In some cases, it is not possible to fully validate an address. Here ValidateAddressGlobal has a unique deliverability assessment feature that classifies addresses according to their probable deliverability.