What is Address Parsing?
In essence, address parsing is breaking down and identifying the individual components of an address to make it more understandable and usable for computers. This process ensures that each part of the address is correctly identified, interpreted and standardised for greater accuracy in subsequent applications.
Let’s take a letter that you receive in the mailbox.
On the front, there’s a block of text with your name, street address, city (or suburb or town), state, and postcode (or ZIP code). All these combined tell the postman where to deliver the letter.
Now, let’s say you have a robot assistant, and you want to teach it to understand and organise this information.
You’d instruct the robot to recognise the different parts of the address: This part is the person’s name. This is the street they live on. This part tells us the city, and so on.
Address parsing is like teaching the robot to recognise and separate these individual parts of the address. So, instead of seeing one big block of text, the robot (or computer program) sees the address as different pieces of information:
- name,
- street,
- city,
- state, and
- ZIP code/postcode.
This helps computers and software understand and manage addresses more efficiently, just like how you can easily tell apart the street name from the city when you look at the address on a letter.