Re: Journal Paper on the comparison of Address Standards

[kumar.sydney@gmail.com]

Team,

FYI. I have agreed to the invitation.

Regards,

Ram
-----------------------
From: Serena Coetzee  
Sent: Wednesday, 17 September 2008 1:19 AM
To: Ram Kumar
Cc: Antony Cooper; Morten Lind; Martha McCart Wells; Ed Wells; Sara Yurman; Carl Anderson; Nick Griffiths; Michael Nicholson
Subject: Journal paper on the comparison of address standards



Dear Ram,

After the successful completion of the ISO workshop in Copenhagen earlier this year, and the positive feedback on the paper 'Towards an international address standard' that we presented at the GSDI-10 conference in Trinidad earlier this year (see attached or online at http://www.gsdi.org/gsdi10/papers/TS21.2paper.pdf), we, the authors of the GSDI-10 paper have decided to take the GSDI paper one step further and make a journal paper out of it. All of us have agreed that the journal paper should include the UPU and OASIS address standards, preferably with you, as well as someone from the UPU as co-authors.  This would give you the opportunity to include and publish the comments that you sent on the GSDI paper.

Journal papers are peer-reviewed, usually by three independent reviewers, and therefore the status of the paper as a reference for anyone studying or working with address standards will be improved (in comparison to a conference paper). 

In order to convert the conference paper into a journal paper, we will have to shorten it (anything longer than 20 pages might be rejected without even being read). Our suggestion is to limit the main part of the paper to a presentation and comparison of different address standards (only), add to this an Introduction with some background on addresses and address data standards, an analysis section that discusses some of the major differences and similarities, and a conclusion.  In other words, we take out the benefits of standardization etc., the potential scope and route for an international address standard and also some of the content from the Introduction that is in the GSDI-10 paper (we can always reference the GSDI-10 paper where necessary). 

Rough time lines are that we start working on the paper this year, and aim to submit it to a journal early in 2009.  It would be even better if we could submit the paper to a journal in 2008, but since there are so many authors, each with different local priorities, that might be tight. Just in case you are unfamiliar with the process, paper submission to peer-reviewed journals works as follows: we submit the paper and then get comments and recommendations from reviewers (this takes anything between 4 weeks and 4 months or even longer if you're unlucky).  We then have to work these comments and recommendations into the paper, and resubmit it to the journal along with a report to indicate how we have addressed the reviewers' comments.  If we're lucky, it gets accepted, otherwise there is another round of reviews (and so on).

We have looked at the 'Computers, Environment and Urban Systems' journal as a potential journal for our paper.  You can find out more about the journal at http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/304/description#description. It is important to to target a rated journal, i.e. a journal that is in the citation indices of ISI (Institute of Scientific Information) or IBSS (International Bibliography of Social Sciences). Just for interest, below are references to two papers from the above journal that are relevant to our paper.

Title: A comparison of address point, parcel and street geocoding techniques
Author(s): Zandbergen PA
Source: COMPUTERS ENVIRONMENT AND URBAN SYSTEMS   Volume: 32   Issue: 3   Pages: 214-232   Published: MAY 2008
Times Cited: 1 (and one of the journal's top 25 downloaded articles)

Title: An iterative road-matching approach for the integration of postal data
Author(s): Zhang M, Meng L
Source: COMPUTERS ENVIRONMENT AND URBAN SYSTEMS   Volume: 31   Issue: 5   Pages: 597-615   Published: SEP 2007
Times Cited: 0 

To give you an idea: if we aim for 20 pages, below is a potential (crude) outline for the paper. 
Abstract (half page)
1. Introduction (one and a half page)
2. Standards (12 pages)
3. Analysis (four pages)
4. Conclusion (half page)
References (one page)

If the UPU, OASIS, Danish, South African, UK and US standards are in the journal paper, referring to the outline above, that allows for two pages on each standard.  Unfortunately, the work on the INSPIRE address specification will not be ready for inclusion, but we can refer to the work that is happening there.  We could get an Asian standard on board and then there would be a bit less than two pages per standard.

So the question is: are you interested in joining us on this journal paper?  I have offered to write most of the Introduction, analysis and conclusion, and send it around for comments to the rest of the authors.  In other words, you would mainly be responsible to provide the information about the address standard that you are involved with, and to comment and make suggestions on the rest of the paper.  I appreciate that not all of you work in an academic environment where paper writing is part of your day job, and hope that you will be able to find the time for the paper if we do it in this way.  You are obviously more than welcome to contribute more (such as a whole section) to the paper. 

Looking forward to hearing from you!

-- 
Regards,
Serena Coetzee

Department of Computer Science
University of Pretoria
Pretoria
South Africa