[Talk-GB] Envelopes map

[Robert Whittaker (OSM lists)]

On Wed, 19 Jan 2022 at 20:33, Rob Nickerson <rob.j.nickerson at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure we should assume that the name=* tag would appear on an envelope so haven't included it, but a couple people have raised that today. I guess the first thing to work out is if we see the building occupant as part of the address of that building. For residential properties we don't, so following that logic, why should we include the (current) occupant of commercial buildings within the address?

The simple answer is because the business name is quite often a
necessary part of the address, at least with the way we currently tag
things. By not including the name=* value we're not able to form a
full address in many cases.

For example, most churches with addresses will be tagged with
name=[church name], addr:street=[street], addr:city=[post town]. At
least for older churches there will typically be no house number.
While it could be argued that the name should go in addr:housename as
well, I doin't think that duplication is a good idea, and it's
probably not what most mappers will have done. The same applies to
many schools, and other amenities like community centres, fire
stations, police stations, etc. In not all cases could the
organisation name be said to be the housename. For shops and other
businesses, I think it's useful to include the business name in the
address, whether or not it's actually needed. In some cases it
definitely will be, e.g. several different businesses within the same
named building, where there are unit numbers to distinguish them. The
simpolest and safest thing to do is to include the
business/organisation name when present and we know it's a
non-residential address.

Royal Mail's address format includes an "Organisation" field at the
start of the address for such use.

So for OSM objects with one of the primary tags {tourism, amenity,
leisure, shop, healthcare, craft, office} present (have I missed
any?), I think we should include the name=* tag at the start of the
envelope address. It would probably be useful to also check whether
name=* is a duplicate of addr:housename=*, and not include both if
they are exact matches.

Robert.

-- 
Robert Whittaker
https://osm.mathmos.net/