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

[Mark Gray]

The discussion about how to tag a street name is important
whether the tags are on the street or in an address.

Can we move toward using relations instead of tagging the street
name in each address?

Copying the street name into each address is problematic.
If we hope to some day have all addresses in OSM, I hope we can
come up with a more efficient and consistent way to store a street 
name, however many tags are used for it, only once per section of
same-named street.

There are some proposals for how to do this with relations:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relation:associatedStreet
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relations/Proposed/Street
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relations/Proposed/Collected_Ways

All of these solve the street name duplication in each address and some
also may solve name duplication across different ways of the street.

In taginfo, I see there is already some use:
86023 instances of associatedStreet
14921 instances of Street
This is still small compared with:
15461897 addr:street

Every time I tag addr:street, I wonder how well it works. What
will happen when someone decides to expand the name of the street
or edit a prefix or suffix? How does an address stay associated
with a street when the link between them, the name, can be edited
in either place while no change is made to all the other things on
this street? Each addr:street could contain its own unintentional
variation of the street name.

Now that we have embraced relations for highway routes, can we do
something similar for street names in addresses?

-- 
Mark Gray
http://code.google.com/p/vataviamap/