borenmt wrote:Concerning the meetinghouse locations, we rely on latitude and longitude because matching to street address will result in too many "not found" situations, especially internationally. Even in the US, a match rate of 80% or so is common, leaving 20% not found. For those that are found, the algorithms for placing an address at the correct point along a stretch of road is always approximate, and can result in errors of many feet or even miles in rural areas. Algorithms can also not reliably place the meetinghouse on the right side of the street, not yet anyway. So... we rely on local employees, clerks, and members to help us gather accurate lat/long coordinates.!
I am a little surprised at the 80% match rate for meetinghouses. Are the 20% problems concentrated in rural locations? For cities and suburbs, I would expect the rate to be much higher, approaching 100%, especially since the church presumably has clean street-address data for its meetinghouses. (Perhaps the geocoder is tuned to be too reliant on postal address validation, and meetinghouses typically do no receive mail service, even though their street addresses are perfectly valid on the local street map?)
If there are this many problems mapping a few thousand meetinghouses with good addresses, imagine the problems developers will face trying to map a few million members with the relatively dirty street-address data harvested from MLS.
As for the solution of using clerks to send in corrected coordinates, I think that is generally doable. But this beta site does not come close to mobilizing the army of clerks. Only a tiny fraction are even aware of it. I think you need to broadcast a message through the MLS system, explicitly tasking the clerks to validate their locations and giving precise instructions on how to capture correct coordinates if need be and communicate them back to you.