Canonical addresses vs Alias addresses

What is the difference between canonical and alias addresses?

Addresses have a lot of terminology and these have an impact on your address verification and processes. We get asked this question frequently and the extensive number of alias address in our database demonstrates the importance of understanding the difference and accounting for it.

Canonical Addresses

Canonical addresses are the official addresses that are supplied to us by official sources such as Australia Post PAF, Geocoded National Address File (G-NAF) or New Zealand Post. They contain the correct street name, the correct suburb and are spelled correctly.

By default, the Addressfinder widget always selects the canonical addresses when performing autocomplete and verification operations.

Alias Addresses

Alias addresses are addresses with unofficial address components. These may include nearby suburbs, commonly misspelled street names or older street names which have since been superseded. All of these potential alias addresses are included in the Addressfinder database in order to enable the user to find and select them. When using the Addressfinder service you will not receive this inaccurate address, however as the default action of the widget is to return the (corrected) canonical address.

Addressfinder's Australian database alone contains over 190 million alias addresses.

Alias addresses commonly occur with ranged addresses but also with nearby suburbs when a nearby suburb is used in the alias address. On selection the correct suburb is populated into the suburb field.

On rare occasions even more interesting alias addresses can exist where the number changes completely: For example, 253 Ross Road, YOOGALI NSW 2680 becomes 31 Ross Road, YOOGALI NSW 2680.

Or even better, the address appears to have nothing in common with the selected choice. For example, 32 Bryant Street, ASHGROVE QLD 4060 is actually 26 Jubilee Terrace, ASHGROVE QLD 4060. A little investigation tells us that the physical property is indeed at the corner of Bryant Street and Jubilee Terrace, which explains the odd behaviour.

API Responses

The Addressfinder APIs will return both an `id` and a `canonical_address_id`. API developers can choose to mimic the Addressfinder widget behaviour by using the `canonical_address_id` field to query the Address Metadata API.

Read the API parameters and responses.