[Tagging] housenumber on node and area

[Colin Smale]

On 2015-05-28 12:24, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote: 

> 2015-05-28 12:12 GMT+02:00 Colin Smale <colin.smale at xs4all.nl>:
> 
>> If you have a block of flats with 2000 people apparently living at the same address, I can't imagine that a single, shared letter box will be enough. Each apartment will have its own address. 
>> Or are you talking about where each apartment has its own private letter box in the entrance hall?
> 
> yes. the latter. They all have the same address, but they all have their own individual letter box. There are many many cases like this. You (the mail service) don't need a distinct address for each property (=apartment / unit).

Maybe the postman doesn't care, but I (the sender of the letter) do. I
want to know that the correct "John Smith" gets my letter. And I am not
going to send everything with "recorded delivery" just in case. In my
opinion, the apartment number (= the letterbox identifier) is therefore
part of the address. 

>> Which would bring us back to "what's an address?" Is it for delivering letters, or is it about the property itself?
> 
> it is all of this.

You are of course absolutely right, my question was intended
rhetorically... but nonetheless with a serious background. "Address"
means different things to different people. Either we federalise and
delegate responsibility for the model to countries (agree to differ),
and give up on the futile exercise of trying to agree on a simple model
that will fit every case in the world, or we analyse various systems
across the world and make a more abstract model which can fit all of the
cases analysed - which will probably be viewed by everyone as
"unnecessarily complex" for their particular use case. 

> Cheers, 
> Martin 
> 
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