[Talk-ca] duplicate address data

[john whelan]

I was on a Federal government committee that looked at addresses.  Stats
Canada for the labour force survey or unemployment survey has its own
database of addresses.

A Canada Post postcode may refer to a physical location which is normal, or
a post van route which is the rural route side of things, or an
organisation. The last is rare but does exist and its not linked to a
physical location.  If the organisation moves it keeps the same post code.
Government offices in Gatineau are given an Ottawa post code as a lot of
mail is to other departments and it would otherwise go to Montreal to be
sorted.  Gatineau is across the river from Ottawa.

A physical postcode may have the sorting office name as part of the correct
postal address address, or the municipality or a name that Canada Post
invents.  My official Canada Post address is Orleans, ON K4A 1M7 it used to
be Navan ON K4A 1M7, Navan had the post office where the mail was sorted
and is a municipality.  Before amalgamation I lived in Cumberland  but now
I live in Ottawa. The house has not moved.

K4A is an Ottawa post code and there is no municipality and never has been
called Orleans.

The addresses that come from CANVEC come from yet another government
department and I understand these are obtained from the provincial
governments not Canada Post.

Cheerio John

On 27 March 2015 at 22:54, Stewart C. Russell <scruss at gmail.com> wrote:

>  Hi Gerd,
>
> I've tried the latest data for Ontario.
>
>
> Addressing in Canada is a little bit, um, *special*. And I say that as
> someone born in the UK, a country famous for its ultra-baroque addressing.
>
> The important thing I've learned about addresses here is that postal
> address ≠ civic address. City addressing is mostly logical, although with a
> lot of the municipalities being forcibly amalgamated in 1998, there are
> many redundant municipality names/boundaries that *kind of* matter in
> addresses. For example, I live in *Toronto*. If you check Canada Post's
> address finder, I live in the (former) Township of *Scarborough*. My
> postal code, according to Canada Post and almost everyone on the planet, is
> M1K 3N*7*. But my civic address, the one for which I pay property taxes,
> has a postal code of M1K 3N*8*. But the City of Toronto sends that tax
> bill to M1K 3N7, as Canada Post doesn't agree with the city.
>
> [Some bright spark at a vendor I use decided to rationalize all of the
> former municipality addresses into the more modern *Toronto* — and
> immediately broke my pre-authorized credit card payments. Seems that the
> card was attached to a Scarborough address, which didn't verify against
> Toronto, so payments were stopped.]
>
> Confused yet? Wait until you get to the countryside. There you get postal
> addresses which might include a Rural Route number (a mail delivery route)
> instead of a street name. There are also County/Township Route numbers,
> which are actually street names, but can also have names, like "Prescott
> and Russell Road 17", which is County Route 17 on the border of Prescott &
> Russell counties. There's yet another address form in rural areas, which
> includes the multi-digit 911 number. This is the emergency services number,
> and is often given along with the road name. Canada Post may or may not
> deliver to a 911 number. And frankly, the less said about rural postal
> codes, the better.
>
> What could be usefully done is stripping out redundant address data where
> addresses are clearly inside nested administrative boundaries. There are a
> lot of addresses that look like this:
>
>  *<tag k="addr:housenumber" v="1045"/>*
> * <tag k="addr:street" v="Pape Avenue"/>*
> <tag k="addr:city" v="East York"/>
> <tag k="addr:province" v="ON"/>
> <tag k="addr:country" v="CA"/>
>
>
> The last three tags are wholly superfluous, and mean that Nominatim spits
> out overly long addresses like “1045, Pape Avenue, Thorncliffe Park, East
> York, Toronto, Ontario, M4K 3M6, Canada”.
>
> To one of your interpolation examples:
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2009492976 — the end nodes of the
> interpolation have "addr:street
> <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:addr:street?uselang=en-CA> =
> County Road 17", but the street itself has "name
> <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:name?uselang=en-CA> = Prescott
> and Russell Road 17". It would be nice if we could interpolate the nearest
> parallel(ish) road, rather than needing a name.
>
> cheers,
>  Stewart
>
>
>
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>
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