Problems in the address database in Vietnam have existed for many years. There is no general management unit or standardization in addressing.
Many ministries and branches are involved in address data, but each of them is in charge of only part of the data.
The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, for example, only takes responsibility for the addresses of accommodations and tourism establishments, while the Ministry of Home Affairs covers the addresses for administrative procedures, and the Ministry of Construction is in charge of urban planning and numbering houses.
The address data is not homogeneous. In large cities and urban areas, houses are numbered, but they are not in rural areas. The addressing structure (for example, numbering houses and alleys) in the north and the south is different.
In 2017, the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) issued a national postal code set, assigning codes to four subjects: 1/administrative systems of wards, communes, and equivalent administrative units; 2/postal service points belonging to public postal networks; 3/postal service points belonging to the network serving the Party and State agencies; and 4/foreign diplomatic units, consulates, international agencies, organizations and representatives in Vietnam.
In general, the way of displaying addresses and describing objects on digital maps is still complicated, which makes it difficult to share and convey address information.
Many fields, branches need exact address information
Address databases play an important role in a digital economy. In e-commerce, some websites have implemented customer address authentication services to avoid fake addresses. These fake addresses make it difficult to deliver items to owners, affecting postal delivery performance.
Other business fields, including electricity, water, gas, telecommunication and security services, also need exact address information to increase customer satisfaction.
Da Nang, which is striving to be a smart city, has decided that postal addresses must be assigned with codes and they must be defined by locations and coordinates. This includes tourism sites and public places, but also ATMs (auto telling machines), bus stations and other points. This will serve the building of a smart ecosystem based on IoT (Internet of Things).
Meanwhile, An Giang province wants to put all coordinates and locations of BTS stations, power poles, bridges and others on digital maps.
According to Vu Chi Kien, deputy director of MIC’s Department of Post, digital technology makes infrastructure items smart in smart cities.
A street, an urban area, and a smart public administration area must be made up of smart infrastructure. Digital maps are not only used for future city governance, but also for "smart architecture" planning associated with the city's development planning.
Vpostcode and added value from address databases
Taking the mission assigned by MIC, Vietnam Post with 50,000 workers nationwide quickly set to work, collecting information to build the national postal address code platform Vpostcode.
At the launch time in May, Vpostcode provided information about address codes, and locations and coordinates of more than 23 million addresses.
The code has two parts, with 1 of 5 characters of a national postal code and 2 of 7 characters of an open location code, which assigns address codes and positioning on the digital map platform.
Currently, in many rural areas, houses are still not numbered, while social services require transparent addresses. Vpostcode is a tool to assign digital addresses to households.
“Vpostcode is used to generate postal address codes to authenticate a citizen,” Le Quoc Anh, deputy CEO of Vietnam Post, explained.
“The Vpostcode system can provide a solution to the problems of finding medical addresses, fire prevention, and service addresses on the digital map,” he said.
