[Tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - addrN:*

[Friedrich Volkmann]

On 21.01.2015 08:28, Markus Lindholm wrote:
> Before we get carried away by a zillion relations I think we have to
> answer the questions as to what purpose do we want to explicitly
> associate an address with a POI or a building.
> 
> Is it so that the data consumer can find her way to a POI? That's
> obviously superfluous as the POI already has a geographical location
> given.

But not the address, according to your suggestion to keep addresses in
separate nodes.

Concerning buildings, an address node is imprecise. It may be on one side of
the building, while you'd better come from the other side of the building.
Search Nominatim for my postal address Davidgasse 76-80 and click the
"House" in the search results. You couldn't achieve that with a single
address node. In fact, the address node would be at the southern end of the
building complex, while I live at the northern end, so you wouldn't find
your way to my appartement.

> The only purpose I can think of is to facilitate for the data
> consumer to send a physical letter to the POI and that is a bit of a
> fringe use case. With buildings is even murkier as to what the purpose
> would be. Is there any country where the address would be part of the
> ID for the building in the cadastre? Seems unlikely as a building can
> have many addresses.

I think that we don't need to care about the cadastre. It's something
independent from OSM.

I think we should generally not ponder about application purposes too much.
The purpose of tagging is to represent data in a clean and unambigous way.
Leave it over to applications to do something with it or not. If someone
wants to make a carnival report on whether buildings with even or odd
housenumbers are larger, why not?

> So I'm not advocating that a zillion relation be created, just that if
> you REALLY need an EXPLICIT association between an address and a
> POI/building then you should use a relation. And that addresses would
> be stored in the database in a coherent manner.

That mixes the needs of mappers and data consumers. As a mapper, I don't
need such an association at all.

-- 
Friedrich K. Volkmann       http://www.volki.at/
Adr.: Davidgasse 76-80/14/10, 1100 Wien, Austria