Placecast says it is finding traction with its solution for cleaning and managing location-based data. In less than 60 days since it was initially launched, more than 200 LBS-related companies, including WCities, Socialight, Buzzd and AlikeList, have signed up to use the tool.

Placecast says that its initial experience with location-based companies using the MatchAPI platform reveals some interesting insights about the quality of location data. Stats from datasets uploaded indicate that when the Placecast MatchAPI platform cleans a data set, there is an average fault rate of over 8 per cent, growing to as much as 40 per cent in data sets with high proportions of user-generated content.

This margin of error has huge implications for any LBS company working at scale, says Placecast, noting that, with more than 20m records managed in the Placecast platform, the error rates indicate that at least 1.5m listings were incorrect. This is a significant amount of incorrect data for developers trying to deliver a consumer app that correctly sends people to places in the physical world.

Placecast is now rolling out a developer portal in order to continue to provide free services for correcting duplication and matching across different location data sets, which it says are two of the biggest challenges in building location-based services that scale. The portal is live here.

“The industry is joining us in the belief that the solution does not lie in a single, central database, says Placecast CEO, Alistair Goodman. “Every company must be able to maintain their own location data in whatever format they wish and be able to share it seamlessly with others when they want, on their terms, without needing a standard location reference scheme or ID system.”

Placecast MatchAPI disambiguates (dedupes) addresses by identifying all of the different ways to express the address of a location and verifying that those differing expressions refer to the same place. Second, it maps all the relevant IDs from different content providers to that same place so that it is always referred to correctly by any other system. The system has already been pressure-tested for scale: the Placecast Match API has been in place for more than a year and has already processed more than 20m location records worldwide.

Placecast says that for application developers who are aggregating professional and user-generated location content from several sources, the Placecast MatchAPI simplifies the process of de-duplicating and matching content listings to their true locations.

For content providers, the tool streamlines the process of matching venues to their customers’ or suppliers venue data. By exposing venue IDs to developers, says Placecast, providers can tap into new revenue streams by up-selling premium content and taking advantage of ad-based revenue models.

Currently, MatchAPI covers N. American data sets only, with additional geographic coverage to follow. Placecast has wrapped the MatchAPI tools with documentation for both the UI and APIs and has created a community area for posting questions about the tools and the most vexing location data problems.

There’s more information about the tool here.