[Talk-GB] OSM UK address project: tags

[Mark Goodge]

On 22/12/2021 14:34, Simon Poole wrote:
> 
> Am 22.12.2021 um 14:20 schrieb Mark Goodge:
>> ...
>> Yes, but that's factually wrong, at least in the UK, and the wiki is 
>> wrong here. A city is not necessarily the same as a postal town, and 
>> shouldn't be used interchangeably. Doing so adds ambiguity to the data 
>> which is both unnecessary and avoidable.
>>
>> For example, as a data consumer, suppose I wanted to extract a list of 
>> all the pubs in Stoke-on-Trent. The most obvious way of doing that is 
>> to look for everything that's tagged as amenity=pub and 
>> addr:city=Stoke-on-Trent. But, if people are using city as a synonym 
>> for post town, that won't just give me pubs in Stoke, it will also 
>> give me pubs in all the small towns and villages around Stoke. That 
>> would be wrong, and it would be caused by a wrong use of the addr:city 
>> tag. Separating the geographic concept of a city from the address 
>> concept of a post town avoids that ambiguity.
> Sorry but your typical user will enter something like 
> "https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ui/search.html?q=pubs+in+Stoke-on-Trent" 
> and is not going to fiddle around with OSM tags.

I'm not talking about the typical map user, I'm talking about the data 
user, who will start by downloading the data and running their own 
queries against it.

>> More generally, the use of city as a synonym for "urban area" in 
>> address databases is very much an Americanism, and doesn't map onto 
>> British (and much European) usage where the term "city" has a defined 
>> legal meaning. It also doesn't match how the average British user of 
>> address data perceives the term "city", or how it's used by postal 
>> delivery organisations (including, but not limited to, Royal Mail).
>>
>> If the point of this project is to collect address data for the UK, 
>> then we need to collect the data in the format that a typical British 
>> user (and contributor) of the data would use. Otherwise, we're just 
>> setting ourselves up for a whole world of pain caused by some data 
>> contributors reading the wiki and using OSM-specific tags while others 
>> just use the tags which reflect the terminology they would use in 
>> everyday life. The best way to avoid that is for the wiki to follow 
>> typical UK conventions.
> 
> Sorry, but everybody in OSM maps their road classifications to UK ones, 
> don't you think it could just make a bit of sense for the UK to map 
> their address fields to those that everybody else uses because the UK is 
> very very very very late to the game?

Postal addresses are location specific. There is no global standard. So 
for UK postal addresses, we have to use UK specific formatting, for US 
addresses we have to use US specific formatting, etc.

> 
> And again you are confusing the city in addr:city with the city in 
> place=city, and what you display to all those people that supposedly 
> will be collecting the data in the UK has absolutely nothing to do with 
> the string we use as a key internally in OSM. Naturally  there's nothing 
> stopping you from using UK specific address tags, it simply makes just 
> as much sense as another well known exit.

place=city doesn't belong in the tags for a specific node or way (eg, a 
house or other building, though). That's a tag applied to the settlement 
itself.

Mark