South African Support

We recently added South African support to Aim-Smart. Now users can parse ZA addresses, phone numbers, match names using fuzzy logic, and perform other data quality functions within Excel.

One of the most complicated features to implement was the ability to parse full South African addresses, given that the format is not always consistent. We find that often addresses don’t specify the city, but rather only the suburb; however, this is not always the case – sometimes both are present and sometimes only the city is specified. Most often the province is not specified, but even then that’s not always true either. Here are some example addresses:

Waterfront Drive Knysna, South Africa 6571
Old Rustenburg Road Magaliesburg, South Africa 1791
Summit Place Precinct (corner of N1 North and Garsfontein off ramp), 213 Thys St Menlyn, Pretoria, Gauteng 0181
277 Main Rd, Sandton, South Africa
Johannes Road Randburg, South Africa
Porterfield Rd Cape Town, South Africa

As you can see, the format varies significantly; however, the new engine can handle most of the formats we found and does a great job matching addresses.

For gender guessing, we are able to guess gender, but we don’t have the statistical probabilities that exist in the US because we weren’t able to find a data source that allowed us to determine probability.

As with other countries, adding ZA support is very reasonably priced.  Good luck!