[Talk-GB] OSM UK address project: tags

Wed Dec 22 22:21:57 UTC 2021

> On 12/22/2021 8:35 PM Tony Shield <tonyosm9 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Agree with Mark here, I think we need enough information to personally travel somewhere and find the house (etc) we want.
> 
I thought we had agreed we were talking about postal addresses, which are chiefly for the benefit of Royal Mail etc?

Let's walk through a potential use case. Somebody gives me their address, and I want to navigate to there.

First the address gets translated to coordinates, based on either a lookup of the postcode/house number in the PAF, using additional fields as required to verify that the correct house has been selected, or a repeated drilldown through country/county/town/street etc until the correct house is identified. In either case the selection simply yields coordinates.

Then a route is calculated between my current location and the target.

Note how the original address is not used for routing?

Another use case - I post a letter to them and Royal Mail need to deliver it. RM use the Postcode to lookup the next distribution hop until it reaches the local delivery office, at which point it is put into the correct delivery round and a postman will do the last bit.

Note how the original address is not used for routing in a traditional way?

If we drop the hypothesis that we are dealing with POSTAL addresses, we should replace that with some more representative use cases. At the moment we seem to be going round in circles - everybody's answer is correct, but they are all answering different questions. How do we recognise a "good solution" to this? When is it "good enough"?

* When we have a place in addr:* for all the fields that may occur in a UK address so all "informal" addresses can be accommodated
* When we have a mapping for every field in the PAF to a tag in addr:* so all "official" addresses can be accommodated
* When we can take a place (correctly tagged with addr:* data) and produce a usable postal address compliant with Royal Mail's addressing for that location (i.e. possibly including redundant optional information like postal county, but not conflicting with RM about e.g. post town)
* Anything else???

> 
> Somewhere I've recently tried to map -
> 
> 2 Mill Row
> Station Road
> Croston
> Leyland
> PR26 9HZ
> 
> That is from Royal Mail, but the village of Croston is in Chorley (addr:city) Borough Council (and always has been), Leyland is in South Ribble Borough Council -  so that is a construct for Royal Mail; it follows that a more complex database query is required to identify the administrative town.
> 
> 2 Mill Row - not sure
> 
> Station Road - addr:street
> 
> Croston - addr:place but that is illegal - so addr:?? it is a village and Civil Parish.
> 
> Leyland - addr:city but should really be addr:post_town
> 
> PR26 9HZ - I know that one - addr:postcode
> 
> So I would be happy for a distinction between admin and postal address towns.
> 
> Digression - Using the Royal Mail address finder gave me that address - however RM offer a "See this address on a map" feature which  offers an OSM rendering with a centroid location between 50-400 metres North of the true location and in a different street. (DUH!)
> 
> There is even a distinction in law of addresses being capable of personal delivery - at least for HM Land Registry.
> 
> https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/directions-under-the-land-registration-act-2002/direction-1-addresses-for-hm-land-registry-for-the-receipt-of-applications-and-correspondence
> 
> Oh the arcane journey of highways and byways .....
> 
> Tony Shield
> 
> On 22/12/2021 18:59, Mark Goodge wrote:
> 
> > 
> > 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
> > 
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