Image credit: DigitalGlobe

PSMA Australia has launched a predictive address verification service based around a RESTful API, designed to provide fast, authoritative and scalable location intelligence that can be integrated into a range of processes.

The service was launched alongside a new developer portal on October 10, and is powered by the same daily-updated dataset that drives their G-NAF Live address database, their most frequently updated product.

The key significance of this offering is that access to this current and comprehensive dataset is now available in a RESTful API format. Representational State Transfer (often abbreviated as REST or RESTful) services provide vastly superior performance and flexibility relative to traditional web services by — among other benefits — catering for far more effective caching mechanisms in server architecture, standard interfaces for major operations, and decoupling of resources from their representation, allowing their content to be accessed in a range of formats — such as JSON, XML, HTML, and JPG.

RESTful APIs typically offer far greater flexibility and ease of implementation over non-RESTful services. PSMA’s new service offers live access to predictive address verification services in JSON, XML and HTML format, returning fully parsed data with geocode.

PSMA hopes this offering will increase the accessibility of spatial data and provide a method for it to be integrated more readily into business decisions, writing on their blog:

“Organisations are analysing copious amounts of data to drive decisions. To have confidence in the decisions made, a spatial dimension should be included. Geospatial APIs increase the discoverability of spatial data and make accessing it a low risk commitment, with a potential high return on investment.”