What Addressing Offices Ask Before Commissioning an Address Comparison

Terminology

What is an address candidate?

A location that some other county system records and the master address dataset does not, or records differently. The word candidate is deliberate. A finding is evidence that something stands there, and only the addressing authority can turn evidence into a record. Full definitions are on what ACE finds.

What is a subaddress?

The part of an address that points to a unit inside a building: apartments, suites, floors, rooms, building designators, campus locations. A forty-unit block carries one street address and forty places a responder might actually need to reach, and only the first of those is usually in the dataset. That gap matters because the FCC’s dispatchable-location rule under RAY BAUM’s Act calls for the suite, apartment or similar detail needed to find the caller. Outsmart Sub-Addressing covers how offices get them in order.

What is an unofficial address?

An address people are already using that the county never issued. Rural driveway numbers put up by residents, unit labels a developer applied early, whatever a tenant wrote on a utility form: all of it circulates without ever reaching the addressing office. Supplemental systems capture these because they record what the customer told them.

What is a cross-system discrepancy?

One location carrying different address values in different systems inside the same agency. When GIS, CAD, MSAG and tax records disagree covers where the values separate.

Method

How does ACE find addresses that are not in my dataset?

ACE finds missing addresses by reading your authoritative address dataset against systems that recorded addresses for their own purposes. Where one of those systems shows a location the authoritative dataset lacks, or shows it differently, ACE reports a candidate.

Does ACE require specific GIS software?

ACE does not require specific GIS software. It runs as a service, so there’s no license to buy and no platform requirement. Results come back as a table you open in whatever environment your team already uses.

Will ACE change my data?

ACE reads your systems and never writes to them, and no remediation happens under this service. What comes back is a set of findings and rankings, and your addressing coordinator decides what any of it means for the dataset of record.

How is this different from running a geocoder against my address points?

A geocoder tells you whether an address you already hold can be matched to a location. An address comparison tells you about the locations you do not hold at all, which no geocoder can surface because it has nothing to look them up from.

Results

How many address candidates should I expect?

It depends almost entirely on how big your address inventory is. ACE results run from more than 600,000 candidates in a statewide evaluation in Alabama to a few thousand in a single county. Ask instead what proportion of your existing address points needs attention. Where our published candidate counts come from explains each figure.

Do subaddresses really outnumber missing primary addresses?

In the engagements where the question has been measured, yes. Multi-tenant structures enter a dataset as a single point, so each new apartment block or campus widens the gap. A dataset can pass NG9-1-1 validation with every subaddress field blank covers why.

Scope and buying

What does an engagement involve on our side?

Pulling the exports, putting a name against the verification work, and settling in advance what becomes of the candidates that score low. What an ACE engagement involves sets out the steps and the deliverables.

Can a region or a state run this across multiple counties?

Yes, and pooling the data adds something no county-by-county pass produces. A structure that shows up in records on both sides of a county line has been confirmed by two separate authorities. In one example, Florida Region 1 identified more than 110,000 candidates across twelve counties. Pooling county datasets also exposes problems no single county can see on its own: the same road numbered differently on each side of a county line, addresses that both counties claim, and addresses that neither county records.

Is this a one-time assessment or an ongoing program?

Either works and they go to different places. A one-time assessment establishes what’s missing today; a standing cycle re-runs the comparison as new permit, utility and parcel activity accumulates. The second model is the one that stops a dataset from drifting back.

Who inside a county usually owns this?

Usually the addressing authority or the GIS administrator, with the PSAP as a close stakeholder that rarely signs off. Where no designated addressing authority exists, an evaluation tends to reveal that vacancy before it reveals anything about the data. The NG9-1-1 data model also requires every record to name a discrepancy agency.

Ask the ACE team

If there’s a question we didn’t answer, send it to us and mention what the systems you store addresses in.