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Mailing addresses in Open Street
The Open Street online service allows you to optimize itineraries through the addresses of your choice. When entering or importing these postal addresses, you must be very careful about the format of the address, as the service will not include an incomplete address and may even be mistaken about its geographical position.
The operation of transcribing a postal address in geographic position (latitude and longitude) is called geocoding.
We offer a postal address format that works well with our service. If you do not know all the elements of an address, it is better not to treat it rather than to introduce it at any cost in our service, at the risk of making mistakes.
The ideal address format
The Open Street service works best when you provide full addresses with the following.
- Street number and street name (11 rue Corneille)
- Postal code (49000)
- City (Angers)
- Country (France)
Each of the elements described in this list must be separated by a comma. The correct address is therefore 11 rue Corneille, 49000, Angers, France.
The postal code field is highly recommended, but its use is not essential and you can therefore omit it if all the other fields are correct.
Attention, here are counter-examples, ie addresses incorrectly formulated.
- 11 rue Corneille 49000 Angers France
- 11 rue Corneille 49000
- 11 rue Corneille ; Angers
- 11 rue Corneille – France
Advanced users can bypass our geocoding system by directly entering latitude and longitude coordinates (example: 48.856614,2.3522219). This is not recommended for beginner users who may prefer to enter mailing addresses in full.
There are differences between the address format that we request, and what you could write on a mail for it to be issued by La Poste for example.
Here is a list of tips to follow absolutely to avoid geocoding errors.
- Do not include a surname, first name, or occupation. We geocode fixed addresses and not people.
- Do not enter fields other than those listed above (for example, no index numbering).
- Do not enter dates in addresses.
- Do not enter phone numbers in addresses.
- Do not enter GPS coordinates in the literal format (N48°34.289′ E1°66.111′) because the only digital coordinate format latitude, longitude is cited above.
Here is a list of tips that are best applied to facilitate the geocoding step.
- Do not include the region (e.g Picardy)
- Do not enter country initials (e.g NL)
Failure to follow these basic rules results in rough geocoding or even geocoding failure, which seriously hampers the relevance of our route optimisations.
Key-in, or file import
The rules outlined above are valid for the entire Open Street service, i.e for entering addresses one by one on the keyboard, but also for importing a file.
Importing a file with multiple addresses saves a lot of time, but you must respect a format that can be understood by the online application, but Excel import is recommended.
In case of geocoding failure
In case of geocoding failure, the Open Street service displays an error message which closes by clicking on « Ok ». You can consult the list of geocoding errors in the « Read messages » tab.
You can choose between two options: start optimisation by excluding addresses that can not be found, or fill in your addresses with the required fields so that addresses can be found.
If, despite your efforts, an address cannot be found, we advise you to shift the street number one notch or to choose a neighboring address on a street perpendicular to the street of your address.
