libpostal

A C library for parsing/normalizing street addresses around the world. Powered by statistical NLP and open geo data. libpostal is a C library for parsing/normalizing street addresses around the world using statistical NLP and open data. The goal of this project is to understand location-based strings in every language, everywhere. Addresses and the locations they represent are essential for any application dealing with maps (place search, transportation, on-demand/delivery services, check-ins, reviews). Yet even the simplest addresses are packed with local conventions, abbreviations and context, making them difficult to index/query effectively with traditional full-text search engines. This library helps convert the free-form addresses that humans use into clean normalized forms suitable for machine comparison and full-text indexing. Though libpostal is not itself a full geocoder, it can be used as a preprocessing step to make any geocoding application smarter, and simpler.