[Talk-GB] OSM UK address project: tags

[Mark Goodge]

On 22/12/2021 18:41, Simon Poole wrote:
> 
> Am 22.12.2021 um 15:57 schrieb Mark Goodge:
>> ...
>> 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.
>>
> After I've already pointed out multiple times that the "city" in 
> addr:city has nothing to do with the "city" in place=city 

That's my point, though. Using the same term to mean completely 
different things in different contexts is bad design.
> the addr Tags are part of a hierarchical tagging scheme, assigning them 
> semantics outside of their place in the hierarchy and their definition 
> in the wiki is nonsense (I suspect that historically the tag names were 
> derived from your typical preprinted address label but that just doesn't 
> matter). If it makes you feel more comfortable  I'll start a proposal to 
> rename addr:city to 
> addr:this_is_whatever_you_locally_use_for_postal_town, but that would be 
> silly because it wouldn't change the semantics.

What I'd like to do is use addr:town and addr:city for geographic 
addresses in towns and cities, and supplement (not replace) them with 
addr:post_town for postal addresses where the post town is different to 
the name of the actual town or city.

> As Tom has pointed out there are differences between postal addresses 
> and informal addresses that we don't really capture well in OSM if you 
> don't have a full complement of administrative boundaries and potential 
> place areas for non-admin localities, but at least addr:housenumber / 
> addr:housename and addr:street / addr:place are useful to gather in any 
> case. It would however be a good idea to be clear on -what- the UK 
> community is intending to collect.

I do think we need to be clear on whether we are trying to capture 
postal addresses, or descriptive (geographic) addresses. In a lot of 
cases those will be the same, but not always. And it's not clear in the 
wiki whether the addr tag is intended to be used for postal or 
descriptive addresses.

Mark