Read more about the announcement in Yahoo Finance Canada, The AP, and our Canadian press release.
We're excited to share that Plackey's free universal places identifier is now available for Canada!
Placekey, is a free, universal location identifier for places. For joining disparate datasets, Placekey acts as a unifier— it provides a single, succinct string that unifies various ways of representing a place. Our Placekey API allows users to generate a Placekey from inputs as diverse as addresses, points of interest (POIs), or latitude/longitude coordinates. In this way, Placekey creates a convenient way to perform address matching, entity resolution, data quality control, and deduplication.
We interviewed Will Cadell CEO of SparkGeo, a geospatial data consultancy based in Prince George, British Columbia, on what Placekey means for Canadians. Cadell recently lauded the upcoming launch of Placekey in Canada as a way to deal with some of the unique challenges Canadians face when performing data analysis.
Building common addressing or location fabrics to join datasets from disparate sources becomes really powerful.
On the special challenges of address matching in Canada, Cadell explains, "Being able to provide location identifiers for places that typically don't fall into the common denominator of addressing is useful". Those locations might include "First Nations communities, mining or forestry camps." Cadell continues, "We obviously have language to deal with. We've got French in there, as well as a variety of Indigenous languages, we've got a variety of different provinces and territories who see things in different ways. We also have a lot of remoteness. We have a lot of empty, and how we as a country manage for empty is interesting".
He says, "Building common addressing or location fabrics that allow you to pull together datasets from more disparate sources and joining them together using a common location becomes really powerful," Cadell says.
This is where Placekey comes in, according to Cadell. Placekey helps bridge the divide between Canadian datasets from its culturally diverse and often geographically dispersed communities. Cadell explains, "You need a way of commonly understanding locations so you can join census data to location data to addresses to points of interest, and all that kind of stuff going together with a reasonable level of certainty."
Want to learn more?
To see all of Placekey’s pre-built integrations that will speed up your workflow, visit our integrations page.
And to join the largest Slack community for geospatial data enthusiasts, sign up here.
