How to Find Excellent Wine with FME – the Geocoder of IDErioja

The address data is the main geographical reference in the urban area, so it is necessary for georeferencing and spatial analysis of all types of municipal information. To achieve a high percentage of success in address matching operations is not easy, because it is necessary to standardized address data. This information has to be known and accessible to everyone.

With this objective, La Rioja Government (Spain) edits a regional geographic street map with the collaboration of all the municipal administrations. In addition to the viewing, consulting and downloading operation of the produced data, it is essential to develop a direct and inverse geocoding API that allows any application to interact with the address database. To design the API, our development team uses the open software 'Pelias' which works on 'Elasticsearch', a search server specially designed and adapted to optimize these query operations. For this, it is necessary to adapt the address data to this production environment and update it when changes are detected in the original data. To convert and optimize the address data from the original repository to the environment and structure of Elasticsearch, we use FME, since its flexibility allows us to easily adjust to the required structure, and to expand the search database with address data from other territorial areas, coming from other sources of information with different formats and structures.

In addition to offering a geocoding service for our own address data, we have extend its functionality to a national or global level, applying common normalization rules, saving the difficulties that may arise from the integration of data from various sources.

The development of this project has allowed us to have a ‘regional geographic address database’, providing a source of accurate spatial address data for the whole of the public sector, an also a geocoding tool that will allow you to find the exact address of the best wineries.