[Talk-us] Address Standard

[Kevin Atkinson]

On Thu, 12 Aug 2010, Lord-Castillo, Brett wrote:

> The vast majority of street addresses are only going to have only four elements:
> 2.2.1.2 Address Number
> 2.2.2.2 Street Name Pre Directional or 2.2.2.6 Post Directional
> 2.2.2.4 Street Name
> 2.2.2.5 Street Name Post Type or 2.2.2.3 Street Name Pre Type
> That's hardly a significant burden and easily understood by most people. If the other elements don't exist, you don't use them at all. Like I said, it's a tag based model, not a table based, so you don't even need to enter nulls for the other elements.
> The complex elements do not have to be entered either, since they are all compositions of the simple elements. All the other 12 elements are only entered for the rare addresses that use them.

My point I was trying to make was that it still more trouble than just 
entering in a single name, and, in my view, not worth the extra complexity 
in data entry.

I think that these components should be automatically separated by parsing 
the street name some how, and only require manual entry when there is 
ambiguity.  When there is ambiguity, I think just entering in the Street 
Name (base type in tiger) will be enough.

> As I said, the important thing here is that this is likely to be the 
> FGDC standard soon, and looks to be the format for TIGER 2010 and 
> subsequent updates.

The point as I was trying to make is that I personally don't want to deal 
with them in my proposal for prefixes and suffixes.  I want to push 
something simple though which can get used now.  At a latter date we can 
decide if we should fully break out the address and how to use it.

Also my proposal is more about what should be displayed as the street 
name on the map, and less about a full breakout.  I will redo my proposal 
to make that more clear, and also to make sure it is not incompatible with 
a future move to a full breakout.