Imagine your name is Michiel and you live in the beautiful small town of Herenthout where you do important work in the IT-departement of the town hall. The mayor is asking you to update the address file of Herenthout but you are probably busy enough fixing the computers that your coworkers filled with viruses.
That is why BOSA and the three regions of Belgium released the BeST adress dataset as open data in june of this year. It is the authentic dataset that contains all the adresses registered in our country and their respective geographic location.
The problem with the dataset is that it is formatted in a difficult way. That is why we here at osoc did our best to format the data in a useful way for many applications. Now everyone can check if the address you are mailing to exists. Or you can even look for the geographical coordinates of a place with nothing but open data and open source tools. With our project we already set up a service that does exactly this for other osoc projects, namely the hopper and road report app.
We have only scratched the surface. We can’t wait to see what you will do with this authentic data source. Thank you!