About
Address Register is a product of Paradigm Shift Technologies Group Inc., a Canadian company based in British Columbia.
Where this came from
We build planning software for K-12 school districts. Enrolment forecasting is, underneath the demographics, an address problem: you cannot project how many children will arrive at a school without knowing where the dwellings are, which catchment they fall in, and which ones are new since last year.
Every district we worked with was solving that problem separately, badly, and repeatedly. Rosters were being sent to third-party geocoders. Postal codes were being joined to centroids and quietly producing density figures that were wrong by a block. Each new data vintage arrived as an unrelated file and the crosswalk was rebuilt by hand every spring.
The address base we built to stop doing that is this product. It launches deliberately narrow: address points and derived postal code points, national coverage, two formats. Breadth comes after the base is right.
What we think the hard part is
Not collection. Canadian address data is largely available, and much of it is open. The hard part is that it arrives in a dozen incompatible shapes, disagrees with itself, changes schema without notice, and carries no stable identifier, so nothing you build on it survives the next release.
The work is standardisation, precedence, persistent identity and honest documentation of what is thin. That is what a register is for.
How we work
Four releases a year, on a published schedule. A validation report before the data is downloadable, including the municipalities where coverage is poor. A change log that explains what moved and why. Prior vintages kept available so historical analysis stays reproducible.
What we sell
The data is free. Map hosting is the business — building and running published maps for districts and municipalities that would rather not operate tile infrastructure.
That ordering is deliberate. A planning department cannot tell from a sales page whether we understand Canadian address data. They can tell from the data.
Contact
Questions about coverage, licensing or a custom study area: get in touch.