Abstract: The present disclosure pertains to assembling many different ways of designating an address (Source Databases A,B,C) into a single, canonical form (Canonical Database, FIG. 2) and using that canonical form to route the item for delivery (process FIG. 3). The present disclosure deals with systems where the problem presented is that there is either no “proper” address or a plurality of them (e.g. different addresses for different mailers for the same house) (FIG. 1). Preferably, a meta-database (FIG. 5) links across the multiple source databases (A,B,C) and logically connects their contents to the canonical address database, wherein each delivery location has a single associated canonical address designator (532), and each address designator in each source database (536, 538) that refers to that delivery point is linked by the meta-database to that associated canonical designator. Tags (540, 542) may be added to the meta-database entries for accessing the corresponding source databases to update the data.