The concept
You are a street address. Follow yourself into a location.
A raw address becomes a stable place you can cite: an identity, the point it sits on, the jurisdictions that hold it, the hazards that map it, each value traced to the authority that made it.
- 01 · a string arrives
"412 alder crt,, riverbend OR"
- 02 · canonical key
UScountryORregion97405postcodeRIVERBENDcityALDER CTroad412house
- 03 · grounded, each value traced
- a point on the spinepoint_evidence
- a jurisdiction chaincontainment · US Census TIGER
- a mapped flood zonehazard_area · FEMA
Plate I
Seven ways to speak about a place.
A grounding family is a relationship class: a kind of thing an authority can say about a location. Because they describe the relationship, not the source, the same seven carry any country's data.
containment
Reads which admin and statistical areas contain this point.
e.g. US Census TIGER, registry
Same relationship, any country: a family describes what is being said, so a new nation's data plugs into the same seven.
Plate II
External datasets, as grounders.
A grounder is a pluggable adapter: it takes an external dataset, declares who it is (authority) and where it applies (jurisdiction), and attaches typed evidence to a location by family.
flood hazard maps
published by an authority
- classify → hazard_area
- authority → FEMA, registry
- jurisdiction → [US]
typed evidence
hazard_area
| Grounder / authority | Family filled | Authority class | Visibility |
|---|---|---|---|
| FEMA flood hazard | hazard_area | registry | named, public domain |
| US Census TIGER | containment (jurisdiction) | registry | named, public |
| US Census TIGER address ranges | point_evidence (interpolated) | inferred | named, public |
| US DOT National Address Database | point_evidence, identity_key, existence | open_aggregate | named, open |
| USPS delivery point | validation_verdict (deliverability) | registry | named |
| Parcel registry (role, unnamed) | link_evidence, existence | licensed_aggregate | role only |
| Geocoder (role, unnamed) | point_evidence | licensed_aggregate | role only |
One family, many grounders.
A family can have many grounders across countries. The registry is a list; a planner filters it by the question does this grounder serve this country.
The classification never changes.
Canada onboards its flood register under the same hazard_area family, declaring its own authority and [CA]. Only the instance is new; the family stays the same.
Plate III
Authority is reconciled.
When sources speak to the same attribute, a versioned authority ladder decides the golden value and keeps the losers as corroboration. Ties break by validity date, then ingest time.
- 1registryan authority of record for the attribute
- 2licensed_aggregatea curated aggregate, under license
- 3open_aggregatean open, community or agency aggregate
- 4inferredderived or interpolated, not asserted
the geocoder's coordinate
Outranks the interpolation; this is the value the folio cites.
US Census TIGER address-range interpolation
Kept on the record; a losing claim is corroboration, not deleted.
Every value keeps its provenance, expressed as a W3C PROV graph: who asserted it, what it was derived from, and why it won.
Plate IV
A location's path.
Six stops, four gates. Parse and Resolve are open; the last four each hold a gate. A value that is wrong or unattributed cannot pass, so it never reaches a reader.
Parse
read the string as it arrived
open
Resolve
canonical key, deterministically
open
Mint
gate: fail-closed on disagreement
gate
Ground
gate: authority and jurisdiction declared
gate
Reconcile
gate: every value provenanced
gate
Folio
gate: cited or omitted
gate
Each gate is a precondition, not a preference: mint fails closed when candidates disagree, grounding requires a declared authority and jurisdiction, reconciliation requires provenance on every value, and the folio prints only what is cited.
Plate V
The system, honestly marked.
Five layers, each marked with its maturity in form as well as color: filled is serving, an ink outline is built, a dashed outline is proven on one county with the national run pending.
- Serving edgethe live answer to a queryserving
- Location spinethe mint: durable identity at a pointcounty-proven
- Grounding layerthe seven relationship familiesbuilt
- Claim graph and reconciliationW3C PROV and the authority laddercounty-proven
- Build planeopen authorities to durable artifactsbuilt