Autoaddress Blog

Eircode, Eircoding, Eircoded?

We waited years for postcodes to be introduced in Ireland, and then we get eircodes!

It took us a little while at Autoaddress to get our heads around calling them eircodes rather than postcodes, but now it all seems very natural.

The question now is how far to extend the vocabulary, inventing a whole new range of words or stick with existing generic terms? The following are the list of new words we've been trying to get to grips with, together with generic options. We've also run a highly scientific show of hands survey around the office to determine how likely we are to switch to the new terminology.

Eircoding

The process of appending an eircode to an address, usually in batch mode against an existing address database that doesn't have eircodes.

Alternatives:

Postcoding term doesn't appear to be in common use. We use geocoding and Address matching interchangeably at present. Encoding could work as a generic substitute, but Address matching is more descriptive.

Odds of us changing from geocoding to eircoding: 63%

Eircoder

The unsung heroes of the eircoding process. We've got plenty of smart programmers who work on our address matching (or should I say eircoding?) sofware, but in order to ensure rigorous accuracy levels we don't artificially boost match rates at the expense of our accuracy rate (currently 99.75%). Our eircoders are experienced address matching experts who ensure our hard fought increased match rates are quality reviewed.

Alternatives:

Postcoder seems to generally relate to software, rather than a person. Geocoder is the term we've used in Autoaddress up to now, and it's proving difficult for us to change on this one. Possibly because they like their logo smiley

Odds of us changing from geocoder to eircoder: 38%

Eircoded

When the address has an eircode appended, it is eircoded (as long as it's the correct one!)

Alternatives:

Postcoded doesn't seem to be in general use, geocoded is in wide use.

Odds of us changing from geocoded to eircoded: 84%

Eircodable?

You can't put an eircode on a Portugese address! This also applies to invalid or incomplete addresses. We also can't put them on non-unique addresses, as by definition we can't tell which of the identical addresses has the desired eircode. But we can tell you which of your addresses can't receive eircodes, and why, so you can develop a plan to get this information as part of business as usual contact after Eircode launch.

Alternatives:

Postcodable doesn't seem to be in general use, geocodable is in limited use.

Odds of us changing from geocodable to eircodable: 63%

So there you have it, in a couple of years this may be the only page on the Internet with these terms, as everyone may have decided to stick with existing generic terms, we'll just have to wait and see.

Our quality driven eircoding service will be used within the Eircode project to append eircodes to tens of millions of Government database records. To find out how you can avail of this service to ensure you are Eircode Ready for 2015 please contact us.