[Tagging] addr:town

[Jens Glad Balchen]

Norwegian addresses do not use city or town as a term.

Cities and towns are historical terminology in common usage when 
referring to large and small settlements, and they used to carry 
official designation and significance (mostly related to trading 
rights), but they are not used officially today. The administrative 
entities are municipalities, which may encompass several cities or 
towns, and cities and towns may span several municipalities.

A municipal ("street") address is required to be unique within the 
municipality, so any wider use of the address must include the municipality.

Postal addresses use postal codes and postal areas, which do not 
correspond to neither municipal boundaries nor city/town/settlement 
boundaries.

To make the distinction (overly) simple: You cannot visit a postal 
address, and you cannot mail a municipal address.

Some quick examples:

Kong Haralds gate in Stavanger municipality has postal area Hafrsfjord 
and postal code 4044. The complete municipal address for property number 
1 is Kong Haralds gate 1, Stavanger. The complete postal address is Kong 
Haralds gate 1, 4044 Hafrsfjord.

Olav Vs gate in Stavanger municipality has postal area Stavanger and 
postal code 4005. The complete municipal address for property number 1 
is Olav Vs gate 1, Stavanger, and the complete postal address is Olav Vs 
gate 1, 4005 Stavanger.

The wiki states that addr:city is the postal city, which may or may not 
be equivalent to the city the address is in, or to any city at all. In 
that sense, the postal city is the same as the postal area. Calling this 
key "city" is slightly confusing, because it mixes the two types of 
addresses, while not being technically correct for either of them.

addr:town simply adds to the confusion.

If the purpose is to capture postal addresses, wouldn't "postal area" or 
something similar be a better term than both "city" and "town"?

Jens

On 25.09.2022 12:02, Timeo Gut wrote:
> As for the Philippines addr:town essentially always contains the name 
> of the major location in an address.
>
> The bulk of these occurences were added in a manual import of 40.000+ 
> public schools where addr:town tag was assigned over addr:city for all 
> schools that are located in municipalities (mapped as place=town in 
> OSM) and not cities. Additionally large batches of these addr tags 
> were introduced through mass-edits adding many hundreds to thousands 
> in single changesets. Only a minor fraction was added by mappers on 
> individual basis, most likely inspired by pre-existing tags from above 
> mentioned import. Double tagging is a minor issue with only 280 
> instances with identical value in addr:city and addr:town.
>
> I'm curious to hear about the origin of addr:town usage in the other 
> mentioned countries.
>
> - Timmy_Tesseract
>
>
> On 2022-09-25 15:36, Andrew Hain wrote:
>>
>> Clearly mappers in Bosnia, South Korea, Australia and particularly 
>> the Philippines should be asked about this. I am also concerned that 
>> the current description (“The town of the object that forms part of 
>> the address”) encourages using the tag instead of addr:city.
>>
>> --
>>
>> Andrew
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> *From:* Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com>
>> *Sent:* 24 September 2022 16:07
>> *To:* Tag discussion, strategy and related tools 
>> <tagging at openstreetmap.org>
>> *Subject:* Re: [Tagging] addr:town
>>
>>
>> Am Sa., 24. Sept. 2022 um 13:38 Uhr schrieb Andrew Hain 
>> <andrewhainosm at hotmail.co.uk>:
>>
>>     The key addr:town is currently documented as de facto
>>     [https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Item:Q1070][https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:addr:town].
>>     However investigations in the UK have found it to generally be a
>>     mistake for addr:city or
>>     addr:suburb[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Addresses_in_the_United_Kingdom#Address_tags].
>>     Should it be deprecated?
>>     addr:town <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Item:Q1070>
>>     The town of the object that forms part of the address.
>>     wiki.openstreetmap.org <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org>
>>
>>
>> In the areas I know this tag should not be used, but addresses can be 
>> very different globally. Looking at taginfo, this seems to be a 
>> regional thing (some mix ups with addr:city aside): 
>> https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/addr%3Atown#map
>>
>> Still looking at taginfo, I see on 35% in combination with addr:city, 
>> or 41k items, it's these that may indicate there could be something 
>> behind it, intention rather than confusion ;-)
>> https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/addr%3Atown#combinations
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Tagging mailing list
>> Tagging at openstreetmap.org
>> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tagging mailing list
> Tagging at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/attachments/20220925/d69a99bf/attachment.htm>