[Talk-GB] OSM UK address project: tags

[Mark Goodge]

On 22/12/2021 15:14, Tom Hughes wrote:
> On 22/12/2021 14:57, Mark Goodge wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Well I don't think we should be tagging postal addresses
> anyway - certainly I never thought of addr tags as being
> specifically postal addresses. Rather I thought of them as
> being a geographically logical address for somebody trying
> to find the addressed place.

That's a fair point, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree with it. If we 
do follow that principle, though, then that's another reason to use 
addr:village, addr:town and addr:city appropriately, depending on the 
actual geography, and not use addr:city as a synonym for post town or 
urban area.

> If I am trying to find https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/58704865
> then I want to know it's in Bumble's Green, not that the post town
> is Waltham Abbey. Only the Royal Mail care about which delivery
> office delivers the mail to it.
> 
> In any case without consulting the RM database it's mostly
> impossible to know what the official postal address is, and
> that isn't available to us.

We can derive the post town from the postcode, and that's not 
proprietary data. ONS publishes it as part of their postcode products, 
which are OGL and thus compatible with OSM. You can find a list of post 
towns for postcode districts on Wikipedia, for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AB_postcode_area

It's the local part of the address (or, to be more precise, a database 
of the local part of the address) that Royal Mail claims proprietary 
rights in - specifically, the individual premises address. We can't copy 
that information from RM's data, we can only store it in OSM if it's 
been determined from an on the ground survey (eg, actually looking at 
house numbers and street names). If we've got that, then we can 
construct a functional postal address from a combination of the observed 
local street address and high-level address information derived from 
open sources such as the postcode.

Mark