Helping a UK-based French 2017 election campaign using nationbuilder.com, the Liste Electorale Consulaire required four address columns to be normalised for upload. A previous FME WT presentation, to scrape web data and rank music playlists, inspired a similar usage against non-spatial data. Using three transformers, we got the first matches of address strings, assigned next address to empty address strings, and used country name as constant last string to built normalised string sets backward from it. A fourth transformer allowed to compare lists for QC and ongoing data uploads. This talk will be presented by Richard Mosley of Safe Software on behalf of Andrew.

1. Postal address clean-up
Andrew Zolnai, Richard Mosley

2. Andrew Zolnai
Support Specialist, Lead
Development at Safe Software
helped with this project and is
kindly presenting this talk.
Richard Mosley
Geologist turned to GIS for over 30
years, covered all aspects of geo-
data, project and business
management in petroleum and
volunteered geography.

3. Two non-spatial Workbench uses:
1) postal address clean-up
2) & electoral list updates

4. The premise
Ø Help French 2017 presidential / parliamentary election
campaign
Ø Using nationbuilder.com for a London UK based
campaign
Ø Liste Electorale Consulaire is structured but
inconsistent
Ø Ergo normalise 4 address columns into a schema

5. Regex on Steroids
1Spatial FME WT 2015:
Øscrape 4 years worth
of playlists and tracks
off the StrayFM
website
Øand categorise and
rank the most played
artists and tracks
Inspired usage here:
ü StringSearcher
search address
components
ü AttributeSplitter split
them into similar parts
ü AttributeManager re-
order into one schema

6. THE WORKSPACE
Address normalization

7. Clean, rinse, repeat
Get the first matches of
address strings in the 4
address fields
If string is empty then assign
the next address string to it
Country name is constant last
string
Build normalised string sets
backward from it
01
02
04
03

8. THE OUTPUT
Address schema ready to upload

9. But that’s not all…
What about on-going updates to
Electoral Lists?

10. FeatureMerger non-spatial too!
Initial load:
Ø find rejected addresses
Ø repeat the procedure if possible
Ongoing updates:
Ø find the new entries as updated lists are received
Ø repeat the procedure on the “delta” only

11. THE WORKSPACE
Refresh mega-data lists

12. Place your screenshot here
Electoral lists for campaigns

13. Tame non-spatial mega-lists
Metadata is king
Data never come clean
Create schemas is key

14. THANK YOU!
www.zolnai.ca | aiz@zolnai.ca