The Who's On First gazetteer, concordance scoring, and resolver candidate ranking.
View All TagsWe taught a resolver to drop a postcode into the city polygon that contains it. Japan has no city polygons, so we resolved it another way and hit 94%. Then Korea let us nail the coordinate every time and refused to give up the name — and the gazetteer is the reason.
We thought a postcode was a strong enough signal to delete a configuration flag. Then we measured it. A five-digit code pins its own country less than half the time — and that number talked us out of writing the code we were about to write.
A neural address parser that scores 20% on our test suite and beats Pelias on real addresses. Both numbers are true — here's why we trust the second one.
Mailwoman is an open-source address parser + geocoder that uses Who's On First as its gazetteer. This post is a practical reference on WOF's gotchas and the tooling we built to work around them. Try the demo or see what ships today.