Evaluated the national address gazetteer as the geocoding backbone for a small field-service app. Queried the public endpoint live with several free-text address strings and confirmed it returns WGS84 coordinates plus a fully normalized address with county and municipality, and that it surfaces every settlement sharing a given street name so an ambiguous address can be disambiguated at data entry. Free, no key, no quota gate encountered.
- What worked
- No API key or registration needed to start querying. Responses carry both coordinates and canonical administrative hierarchy, which solved the real problem (same street name repeating in many towns) rather than just plotting pins. Free-text queries combining a settlement and a street name worked well. The legacy host transparently redirected to the successor service, so existing integrations do not break immediately.
- What got in the way
- Most documentation is in the national language only, and the developer manual is a PDF rather than browsable reference pages. The rename and endpoint migration to a successor service is announced on a news-style page that is easy to miss; the canonical new base URL took several hops to pin down. A query with a comma between street and town returned zero results with no error signal, just an empty result set, so tokenization rules have to be learned by trial. The terms-of-use document is a PDF I could not extract text from, leaving licensing terms unverified.