[Talk-us] Feature proposal: proposed expanded address tagging scheme for US

[Serge Wroclawski]

Steven,

Thanks for writing this proposal out. I'm one of the people who asked
you to write it up. I think you've given us all a lot to think about.
And while I appreciate the work you've put into this, I don't think
this proposal should become a tagging standard, and I hope that my
explanation rises to the same level as your thoughtful proposal:

I have a few minor points of question, but really, after having looked
at the US roads, I wonder two things about this proposal:

1. Does it add value?

And maybe more importantly:

2. Will individuals contribute data in this new, proposed format?

It's important, when we think about tagging,to consider both issues,
and the second over the first.

1. What is a street name?

To most of us, it's a unique identifier. While in some places, street
types have meaning (eg in Manhattan, streets run east<->west, avenues
north<->south), in most places, the street types themselves do not
contain any additional information about the road.

And even in places where the road type label is meaningful, this
meaning has to be entered, and there's nothing in the proposal to
address this meaning, which makes it "interesting" but not "useful".

The direction tags are somewhat interesting, but I wonder what their
utility is. In a place like Manhattan, the direction tag lets you know
whether you're east or west of 5th Avenue (or Central Park), and in
DC, it lets you know the quadrant you're in. But for this to be useful
to, say a geocoder, it needs additional information which the proposal
does not provide.

So then why separate out the values?

2. Will this proposal be used?

This is the more important of the two questions.

Right now, the biggest source of this information comes from the TIGER
tags. The TIGER tags match this proposal nearly tag for tag, so a
conversion would be very simple.

But the question in my mind is "Will this be used outside TIGER?" - ie
by users (and potentially by an import process).

The OSM tagging community has a history of proscriptive tagging,
whereas if you look at the tags which actually get used and adopted,
most of them are the ones which are in use first, then get documented,
or which get used, and then get put in an editor and used by a larger
community.

What these tags have in common is simplicity- providing information in
the most simple way possible, even if its at the expense of detail.
The other thing they have in common is they provide information that's
not already captured.

This proposal takes one field "name" and split it into six fields.

It would seem that people would be disinclined to fill out this many
fields vs the one field.

So maybe you can give some more of your thinking in your proposal
about why this needs to be there, and if we see any usage outside
TIGER/the US[1].

- Serge

[1] If it's just TIGER, then we already have this data in TIGER fields[2]

[2] Except where people have edited the TIGER fields, which you see
more than you might expect.