[Tagging] Approximate addressing solutions

[Anthony]

On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 4:49 AM, Tobias Knerr <osm at tobias-knerr.de> wrote:
> Yes, you are trying to express something that is different from what I'm
> trying to tag, so we should use different tags to do so.

I thought about this overnight, and, okay, you're right, we should use
different tags.  I wouldn't want to leave a number out even if I knew
the house didn't exist, because it one day might, and I'd be better
off with a relation anyway.  Call it type=address.  A node with the
role "start", a node with the role "end", and one or more ways as role
"way" (connected together, with the first way containing the start
node and the last way containing the end node).  fromleft=*,
fromright=*, toleft=*, toright=*, lefttype=even/odd/all/userdefined,
righttype=even/odd/all/userdefined.  The relation would show the
address range which could be assigned to locations on that section of
road, regardless of whether or not they're currently assigned.

Geocoding software would check for an exact address using the more
precise Karlsruhe Schema first, and then fallback to the relation (and
"linear interpolation", as in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpolation) if that failed.

Tiger/Line data could be readily imported with very little delay, in a
way which doesn't hurt any of the more precise address information we
already have.