Frequently Asked Questions

What browsers are supported?

We test the application in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3.6. We don't have the resources to test more than these two - but you can probably safely use Chrome.

I see some addresses that are wrong. For example, some do not have APNs assigned. When will these be fixed?

A great deal of effort was put into the initial data population, which combined data from 5 agencies in the city. Because of that effort, it is unlikely (but still possible) that we will find a programmatic solution for fixing errors in the addresses. Otherwise errors will have to be corrected manually by using the web application. There are a couple of ways we could fix these errors. We decided that for the time being, given the economic climate, that the stakeholders should fix addresses they are interested in. This makes the cost transparent; the benefit is not as transparent so I'll state it simply - everyone benefits from improved data accuracy.

If you plan to assign a bunch of people in your agency start editing addresses "madly", please let us know well in advance because there will be staffing issues in getting your "Change Requests" approved quickly. In this case, there is at least 1 technical solution that will improve throughput, but we need to code it (10-15 day estimate).

Is there a geocoding service?

There is, but its not formally available for clients other than EAS itself. We expect to make it available but it's not on the front burner.

Is it possible to get a "data dump" of the addresses that are in the EAS?

This feature is specifically identified on pages 6 and 7 of the Enterprise (Citywide) Address System: Master Address Database (MAD) and Address Maintenance Application - Functional Requirements, Business Processes, and Logical System Architecture (366 KB) document, though it is not yet implemented. When this feature does get implemented, the data product will very likely be available at DataSF.

Until that time, an early, and completely unsupported, release (December 2009) of the addresses is available, compliments of Mike Wynne at the Planning Department. These addresses are available as a point compressed here in ESRI Feature class format. The concomitant parcel polygons are available here which is also in ESRI Feature class format. The original PostgreSQL database dump is available here.