Hi John, what we done in the API service is always provide the best-of-the-best datasets we can provide.
With geocoding we always recommend to our geocoding customers to run a street geocoding dataset as the base as these provide 'coverage' and then to add address points to it to provide 'address integrity' and certainty about the 'positional accuracy'. And in the API we have taken our own advice.
In the vast majority of counties delivering the "best" is easy because we have a single street based geocoding dataset or a single street plus a single address point dataset. There are a small number of anomalies that break this rule:
- Japan and South Korea only have an Address Point dataset - Japan because streets are not used in the address. South Korea because the data cannot be exported outside the country, but they did release some AP's. For these best is the only dataset we have.
- Some other countries we have competing datasets because we are continually sourcing new data as part of our best-of-breed multi-sourcing strategy. Countries with competing streets datasets are France, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Portugal, Sweden, India, USA. Countries with competing address point datasets are Austria, Belgium, Canada, Hong Kong, India, Italy, UK and USA. Our approach to choosing is based on an internal benchmarking exercise. And if we introduce a new dataset in a particular country that provides and improvement, we either switch it out or add it depending on a careful balance between match rate, positional accuracy and throughput.
Now I suspect John, because I know you so well, you didn't want this level of detail. You actually want to know who the data vendors are the each country. And as you can tell from my answer above, it's likely to change and be dynamic. You can check out the quarterly Spectrum Global Geocoding Module and Release Notes and it will give you the detail of what data we have available. In January, with a fair wind and some good planning, I am hoping to have a website available that describes what is available. And you have now given me a new requirement to identify what is actually within the API's.
So finally, to answer the specific question, USA is HERE Streets + PB Master Location Data (MLD). Germany is TomTom Street + TomTom Points.
Mike