[Tagging] Reviewing the use of addr:housename

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Sun, Jun 15, 2014 at 9:19 PM, Matthijs Melissen
<info at matthijsmelissen.nl> wrote:
> On 15 June 2014 19:22, Peter Wendorff <wendorff at uni-paderborn.de> wrote:
>> What is the address in your opinion?
>
> That is of course not black and white. But I do think house names have
> a different status in the UK than they have in Germany. In Germany,
> you would normally not include the house name when writing a letter.

This is similar to the United States. There are exceptions, but often
a building is not a substitute for a number and street address.

In order to get a better sense of the scale of the issue, I made a
quick query using Overpass of the nodes with addr:housename in the US
and got back ~6300 results. This is only nodes, so there would be more
ways.

Here's the top 20 results, sorted by frequency. The first column is
the frequency they appear in the database and the second column is the
value:

     22   "McDonald's"
     16    "Lowry Town Center"
     16    "Burger King"
     15     "Walgreens"
     15    "McDonalds"
     15    "Fairways Center"
     13   "Tysons Corner Center"
     13    "Laramie County Community College"
     12    "Taco Bell"
     12     "Kroger"
     11     "Subway"
     11     "Starbucks"
     11     "Pizza Hut"
     11     "CVS"
     10     "Wendy's"
     10     "Home Depot"
      9     "Walmart"
      9     "Quintard Mall"
      9     "Millstone Building"
      9    "Marché Maisonneuve"

For non-Americans, McDonald's, Walgreens, Kroger, Subway, Starbucks,
Pizza Hut, CVS, Wendy's, Home Depot and Walmart are all chain
stores/restaurants.

Going down into the data a bit, there are six incidents of each of the
following values:

Suite A
Suite B
Suite 101

A majority of the values are either partial addresses or the names of
the business inside- neither of which is the addr:housename.

But as the top 20 shows, there are some interesting side cases. Tysons
Corner Center is a large shopping mall
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tysons_Corner_Center). One could argue
that a business inside it could arguably be in that housename. It's
not the interpretation of the tag that I would use, but it's not
necessarily a mistake either. There are ~50 incidents of
addr:housename with the word "Mall" in them. That's compared to ~250
with the word "Suite", or "Unit" in them.  (the vast majority of them
are the names of businesses).

I'd argue that in the US, the addr:housename tag is being mostly misunderstood.

- Serge