[Talk-GB] OSM UK address project: tags

[Robert Whittaker (OSM lists)]

On Wed, 22 Dec 2021 at 15:18, Tom Hughes via Talk-GB
<talk-gb at openstreetmap.org> wrote:

> 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.

But if you're trying to help a non-local find the place, then *also*
including the name of a nearby larger town that they might have heard
of would be very helpful. In the case of many villages, it would also
be essential, as the village name is not unique within the UK (or even
within the same county in some cases).

> Only the Royal Mail care about which delivery office delivers the mail to it.

And thus anyone wanting to address a letter to be posted will also
care about it. If we want to produce from OSM a viable address dataset
to rival the OS and RM products, then we will need to include all the
recognisable address elements that users are used to seeing on those
datasets.

> 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.

That's true for the actual official address, but I think there's
enough information and knowledge around to come up with decent
approximations in most cases. For example, there are plenty of open
data sources including addresses that mean you can pretty reliably
deduce the post town in almost all cases. Any dependent localities can
be well-approximated by hand from the post town, the settlements
mapped in OSM and some local knowledge.

Robert.

-- 
Robert Whittaker