Research involves verifying the data through an official source (i.e official website or claimed social media) or 3 unofficial sources. Clearly, unreliable sources should not be considered at all.
Use official resources like businesses’ official websites, national postal service websites, and government websites whenever possible (Guidelines section 2.1.1)
If you can’t verify the data correct or incorrect, rate Can’t Verify.
To give you some guidance, please see below some of the resources that Analysts from Italy (it_IT) market have reported to be helpful when performing research:
Helpful resources to research if POI/Business is open/closed:
^ https://telematici.agenziaentrate.gov.it/VerificaPIVA/IVerificaPiva.jsp – Useful to verify if the business is open/closed using VAT/IVA number
Helpful resources to research Name Accuracy
In the case that a result business has no website and no available street/online imagery check Google/Bing web search to provide consensus of 3 sources such as:
Helpful resources to research Address Accuracy
Poste Italiane to verify Sub-Locality, Province Code and Post Code, Official website for other components:
** For address accuracy you should use the official URL except for three components, Sub Locality, Province Codes and Postal Codes. The thought process here is that official sources are not always accurate when it comes to postal code, province code and sub-localities so we want to check them against Poste Italiane as it’s the most accurate source.
Sub localities should also be verified against Poste Italiane because postal villages are mandatory address component for POIs and often POIs will omit valid postal villages or will list unnecessary sub localities on their URL so we wouldn’t want to demote an address if it was missing this. See CSGLs section 3.1.1.
When looking for postal villages on Poste Italiane webpage, it is useful to search for postal code instead of locality as it gives a list of all localities with that specific postal code. Sometimes it happens that the official name of hamlet differs slightly from other colloquial names for the same locality, and therefore it might not be fully matching the result title, therefore postal services wouldn’t recognize it as such. For example, postal village Mirabello of Pavia municipality is listed as Mirabello di Pavia and searching just Mirabello will not produce result, while searching for postal code 27100 returns this postal village.
Postal code should also be verified against Poste Italiane. Sometimes business owners will list adjacent localities or suppressed postal codes instead of the actual one, so we want to use the postal code information provided in Poste Italiane above the Official website for the business.
Checking between the official URL and Poste Italiane should only take a few seconds, the work flow is to just copy in the postal code or locality/sub-locality from the official URL into Poste Italiane and it generally will bring back the address needed to verify.
Basically it boils it down to:
Poste Italiane is the source to verify the Postal Code, Sub-locality and Province code
Official URL – everything else.
Helpful resources to research Transit POIs
Remember that Transit POIs are features without an expected address. Locality is the only mandatory component, but if the full address is returned it must be correct.
Helpful resources to research street numbers:
https://www.anncsu.gov.it/it/consultazione-dellarchivio/ricerca-strade-e-numeri-civici/
Helpful resources per province:
https://geoportale2.sportellounicodigitale.it/GisMaster/Default.aspx?IdCliente=005005&IdSer=