Why do I need an ACE?

What ACE finds: address candidates and subaddresses

ACE identifies missing addresses, incomplete subaddresses, unofficial addresses, and cross-system discrepancies, then ranks every candidate by confidence.

At a glance

  • Subaddresses identify units inside a structure: apartment, suite, floor, building, room, campus location. 
  • An unofficial address is already in use. Nobody assigned it through the county, region or state’s workflow. 
  • Cross-system discrepancies are one location carrying different address values in GIS, CAD, RMS, the MSAG, tax records, and permitting. 
  • ACE works from the authoritative dataset and compares it against additional sources the client provides. 
  • An address candidate is a location that supplemental data says exists and the Authoritative Address Point Dataset does not record. The agency decides whether it becomes an address. 

What is an address candidate?

An address candidate is a location that appears in one or more data sources and is missing, incomplete, or inconsistent in the jurisdiction’s authoritative address data.  A candidate becomes an address when the addressing coordinator confirms it and writes it into the authoritative dataset. In the state of Alabama, that review identified 600,000 address candidates in the state’s GIS.

Read the Alabama Case Study

Subaddresses, and why they outnumber missing primary addresses 

A subaddress identifies a specific unit within a structure: an apartment, suite, unit, floor, building, room, or campus location. 123 Main Street is a primary address. 123 Main Street, Building C, Suite 410 carries two levels of subaddress.  A multi-tenant building sits in the dataset as one point, while the forty units inside it never appear, and nothing in the record indicates that anything is missing. Multi-family housing, mixed-use development, senior living and university campuses widen the gap as fast as they get built.  There’s a regulatory dimension as well. FCC rules implementing RAY BAUM’s Act require 911 calls to carry a dispatchable location, which the Commission describes as “street address of the calling party, plus additional information such as suite, apartment or similar information.” Supplying one depends on the authoritative dataset holding the unit in the first place, and DATAMARK Technologies’ field guidance on structuring that data is in Outsmart Sub-Addressing.

Read the blog: Outsmart subaddressing

What counts as an unofficial address?

An unofficial address is already in real-world use and was never assigned through the jurisdiction’s official workflow.  Residents sometimes post address numbers on rural driveways before those numbers are formally recognized. Developers may also label units months before the county officially assigns them, and those labels persist because tenants have already been using them by the time the jurisdiction reviews the site.  These cases surface in an evaluation because supplemental systems often capture them first. A utility account or waste collection route may contain an address the addressing authority has never recorded, giving the agency a chance either to formalize that address or to correct the external record carrying it.

Discover Address Comparison Evaluation (ACE)

When your own systems disagree

A cross-system address discrepancy means the agency’s own systems hold different address values for the same place. GIS, dispatch, the Master Street Address Guide, tax records and permitting may each carry a version. Every version is plausible, but they disagree.  Departments update on their own cycles, so the divergence is internal, and it stays invisible until an operation needs two systems to agree. Where the values separate, and how an addressing office finds them before a call does, is covered in when GIS, CAD, MSAG and tax records disagree.

One house, six records: why your address data doesn't match
Helping clients across the nation uncover more than 2M address candidates.

Where our published candidate counts come from

Generally, the numbers increase with the size of the area being evaluated. It’s important to assess the percentage of a jurisdiction’s existing address points that require attention, rather than relying solely on averages across different projects.

The Alabama 9-1-1 Board conducted a statewide evaluation and found over 600,000 address candidates.

Since 2020, The Alabama 9-1-1 Board and DATAMARK Technologies have partnered to unify GIS data for NG9-1-1 across the state.

Florida Region 1 discovered over 110,000 addresses through ACE.

DATAMARK Technologies helped 12 counties unify NG9-1-1 GIS data to improve regional readiness and collaboration.

Calloway County, KY leveraged ACE to get to zero critical errors in their GIS data.

Calloway County maintains trusted, NG9-1-1-ready GIS data through a long-term managed services partnership with DATAMARK.

Across engagements in the United States, DATAMARK Technologies has identified more than 2 million address candidates.  

Learn more by visiting questions addressing offices ask before commissioning an ACE comparison.

Apartment complex checked against three sources: two confirm its address and one is missing it.

Next Step

Each candidate ACE returns is a location the jurisdiction’s systems can’t precisely place. The Address Comparison Evaluation service page covers what an engagement includes. Before that conversation becomes useful, though, an addressing office needs a number it often lacks: how many address points in its dataset have been verified against any external source, and when that verification last occurred.

Discover ACE

Uncover missing addresses

Our ACE service helps agencies uncover missing, incomplete, and misaligned addresses using supplemental data sources, providing a stronger foundation for NG9-1-1 readiness, public safety, taxation, and daily operations.

Address Comparison Evaluation (ACE)