[Tagging] [OSM-talk] collection/street relation: which one to use?

[Anthony]

On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 10:16 AM, Richard Welty <rwelty at averillpark.net> wrote:
>  On 8/19/10 10:10 AM, Anthony wrote:
>>
>>> And even if you add the add:street, nothing says in which town.
>>
>> Do you know of any houses which are in a different town from the
>> street in their street address?
>
> in the case of the US, postal addresses are tied to post offices, not
> to towns. a short distance away from me, there are addresses
> physically in the Town of East Greenbush, but with West Sand
> Lake postal addresses because that's the post office doing the
> delivery to the area.

Yes, I used to live in such a place too.  I lived in Foo Township, but
my mailing address was The City of Bar.  However, that wasn't the
question, since I lived in Foo Township and the street I lived on was
in Foo Township.

> likewise, there are cases where the borders between municipalities
> run down road centerlines, the housenumbers on one side are
> not necessarily coordinated with the housenumbers on the other
> side.  they might even be getting deliveries from different post
> offices, and so would have different city and postcode values from
> one side to the other. the value for addr:street would be the only
> thing that's actually shared (well, that and state.)

Still not what I was asking, but I guess it's closer.

What I was thinking was that given addr:street (e.g. addr:street=Main
Street), you could assume that town in which the street was located
was equal to the town in which the building (or POI) was located.
However, it might be the case that the street is actually on the
border between such town and another town, or maybe even a few meters
on the opposite side of the border (in cases where the street
centerline and/or the legal boundary changed but not both).

So, I guess in those borderline (literally) cases you couldn't assume
the street was located in the same town as the POI.

On the other hand, thinking about the response by Jukka, it probably
wouldn't be difficult to create a functional index on a function like
"find_nearest_street_with_matching_name".