India Project Addresses Location Search from a New Direction
From the article:
Mapping has become one of the killer apps of the Internet era. It has become practically second nature to do a quick Web search for directions before heading to an unfamiliar destination. It’s so easy: Just plug in your address and where you want to go, and voilà, you’re practically there.
Well, maybe you are, if you live in places, such as the United States, where addresses have a structured form—street number, street name, city, state, postal code. Geocoding applications can parse that data to produce useful results.
But what if you live in a part of the world where addresses do not conform to such regimented structures? What if the key detail in an unstructured address is a spatial relationship to a nearby landmark? What if the address information is incorrectly typed? Geocoding applications are ill-equipped to cope with such instances.
Most of them, anyway, but not Robust Location Search. A research project from Microsoft Research India, it works across multiple countries via an ingenious technique that quickly whittles down a set of potential results until the correct one becomes apparent. And it can even handle incorrectly typed addresses and transliteration across different alphabets.
Note: This news story comes direct from MSR. Sort of a dual news story/press release.
Source: Microsoft Research