[Talk-GB] addr:place

[Will Phillips]

On 26/10/2014 10:36, Andy Street wrote:
> On Sun, 26 Oct 2014 07:28:42 +0000
> SK53 <sk53.osm at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The tag addr:place has been used to locate one element inside another
>> addressed element. See this example for shops within a Tesco Extra
>> store http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/5CN.
> Surely that could be inferred from the fact that the object is
> spatially within the parent?

Sure it can, but I think there is something to be said for tagging 
things explicitly. I would only tag it in this way when it is part of 
the official address.

>> This usage is useful but probably a little difficult to consume,
>> particularly as there seem to be rather more usages of addr:place as a
>> synonym of addr:city.
> The way I've always undersood addr:place was not as a synonym
> for addr:city but rather to specify the bit of the address between
> the road (addr:street) and the post town (addr:city).

My understanding has always been that addr:place is similar to 
addr:street, except when the unit in question isn't a street but some 
other grouping of addresses such as a business park, retail park or 
shopping centre, which serves a similar function to a street in the 
address.

For example:
Unit 5
XYZ Retail Park
Suburb
City

As far as I'm aware this has been what the wiki has said since the tag 
was first proposed and I remember mailing list discussions broadly 
agreeing. The wiki page - 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:addr:place - does explicitly 
state it shouldn't be used instead of addr:suburb.

It's unfortunate when a tag is used by different people to mean 
substantially different things, because it makes the data less useful. I 
think there should be a wiki page dedicated to UK addresses, which would 
suggest best practices for tagging more complicated addresses. The only 
reason I haven't already created one is the lack of discussion and 
consensus over issues like parent/subsidiary streets, usage of 
addr:interpolation on buildings, and so on.