in reply to De Duping Street Addresses Fuzzily
We did this in our office for a client once...
First, we normalized the database to USPS standardized text, based on the chart of accepted postal abbreviations:
http://www.usps.com/ncsc/lookups/usps_abbreviations.html
That alone turned probably 90% of the potential dupes into exact duplicates
as for the rest -- if there are multiple apartments/suites/floors on the same address, we suggested that they send that anyways -- there isn't any real way to tell that address isn't a separate entity. could be neighbors or co-workers who should each have gotten their own postcard.
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