As a founding partner of Placekey, Regrid is excited to have our parcels attributed with Placekey. Placekey is an identifier for any physical place that was created by the Placekey  team with the stated goal of allowing data pertaining to those places to be shared more easily across organizations.

Launched in late 2020, Placekey was designed to help solve the well known problem related to matching different datasets that were in one way or another related to a place and take into account both the ‘What’ and the ‘Where’ of a place and facilitate the matching of disparate datasets related to those places. While many datasets have a spatial component, with at least one Latitude and Longitude value, matching datasets together with these values is very often imperfect, and certainly imprecise due to even very small variations in the coordinates that allow uncertainty to enter into the picture. Placekey is designed to help solve that problem by providing a common method of link creation and making that common method available to a wide variety of users, at scale for free, or very low cost.

The what and the where (from Plackey.io)

Regrid understands that the matching of disparate data types is no trivial matter. We already have several datasets complimentary to parcel boundaries which we have painstakingly directly matched to parcels, and those are currently just a handful of datasets. We recognize the opportunity that still exists to match additional data, even proprietary data, that our customers may need to further their use cases and analysis. As mentioned above, while spatial matching to other spatial datasets is always an option that can be considered, it isn’t always the best manner of matching depending on the nature of the two different datasets. Similarly, tabular matching can be complicated by a variety of factors such as different tabular formats of keys, and that assumes these keys even exist in the first place. Attempts to match on addresses, is very often even more fraught as even very minor differences in the address strings on attempted matches risk significant mis-matching or no matching at all. Addresses in particular are prone to string differences such as minor mis-spellings, variation in how street directionals or suffixes are abbreviated, or not, to name just a few.

Same address in two different datasets (from Plackey.io)

For this reason Regrid has always been intentional about including a variety of different tabular sources that a user can use to attempt to match to their data. Placekey is just the most recent of these matching keys, and one that we know our customers are using so it made sense for us to add it to our Premium Schema.

If you’re a customer of our Premium Schema and are already familiar with, and utilizing, Placekey in your workflow you are no doubt already seeing the benefits of this added attribute. If you hadn’t heard of Placekey previously and you think it might be a benefit for your business you can learn a lot more by visiting the Placekey website where the team has assembled a great collection of support materials that will get you going.

As always if you have any questions for us drop us a note at parcels@regrid.com and we’ll get back to you promptly.