[Talk-GB] Non-intuitive addresses

[Mark Goodge]

On 13/02/2022 08:31, Tom Crocker wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Feb 2022, 20:38 Colin Smale, <colin.smale at xs4all.nl 
> 
>     And addr:place in particular was rather frowned upon in the
>     discussion in December 2020...
> 
> 
> Was it? I read the whole thread (I think) and could only find you saying 
> your humble opinion was that a building was not a place. Meanwhile 
> others suggested its use.

My understanding of the previous discussion is that addr:place is for 
where small settlements (eg, rural villages) use the settlement name 
rather than street names in the postal address. That's what the wiki says:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:addr:place

and there's also an open issue for iD (referenced in the address cleanup 
discussion) which makes the same point:

https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/issues/2898

In particular, the wiki says, inter alia, that

"When using addr:place=*, make sure to keep the name consistent with the 
place=* object which the house number refers to."

If those instructions are adhered to, then it follows that addr:place 
isn't suitable for addresses where the street level line of the address 
isn't a recognised place name.

> Place has a very broad range of meanings in the English language such as
> "...a short row of houses which originally stood by themselves or on a 
> suburban road; any group of houses not properly classifiable as a street."
> "...a physical locality, a locale; a spot, a location."
> "A dwelling, a house; a person's home; (formerly) spec. a mansion, a 
> country house with its surroundings, the principal residence on an 
> estate. Also: a farm or farmstead." 
> https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/144864 
> <https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/144864>
> As in the phrase "Do you want to come over to our place?".
> It's only when we get to usage 10 that we find "a city, a town, a village."
> 
> Meanwhile the wiki for addr:place for a long time said
> "... building, which have number, which belongs to all village or some 
> another polygonal object."
> and makes it clear the European villages are an example.
> 
> So using it for a group of houses doesn't seem obviously incorrect.

I don't necessarily disagree with that. But I think that, intuitively, 
it doesn't seem right to use addr:place for both placenames (eg, small 
rural villages) and non-placenames (eg, named buildings or groups of 
buildings in an urban area).

The wiki does actually mention a tag that seems, to me, to be more 
suitable for the latter, which is addr:block. That's mentioned mostly in 
the context of Japanese addresses where the block is named rather than 
the street. But it seems to me that it would also be useful for any 
situation where the addresses are associated with the building rather 
than the highway. Another UK example of those would be the colony houses 
in Edinburgh, where the buildings have names and the postal addresses 
are assigned to the building rather than the adjacent street, like these:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/55.95813/-3.16949

Those are currently tagged with the building name in addr:street, so I 
presume that nominatim barfs on those, too.

> PS. I completely agree with Mark that the wiki has not made any of this 
> easy, so if any resolution is found it would be great for us to make 
> things much easier to follow for future mappers.

My preference would be that we use:

  - addr:street when the name is that of an associated highway
  - addr:place where it's that of a settlement
  - addr:block where it's a building or campus

I think that's consistent both with the wiki and with normal English 
usage. But my fallback option would be to use addr:street for all of 
them, and for software which uses the data (such as nominatim) to accept 
that the addr:street value won't always match a named highway. That has 
the advantage of simplicity, even if at the expense of precision. And, 
given that iD, currently, only supports addr:street as part of the 
standard address tagging section (see the issue linked to above), this 
is what inexperienced mappers are going to do anyway as they will think 
that's what they're supposed to do.

Mark