[OSM-talk] RFC - postal addresses (relations)

[Andy Robinson (blackadder)]

Claus Färber <GMANE at faerber.muc.de> wrote:
>Sent: 13 January 2008 1:01 AM
>To: talk at openstreetmap.org
>Subject: [OSM-talk] RFC - postal addresses (relations)
>
>Hallo,
>
>I've written a proposal for postal addresses:
>
>http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Relations/Proposed/Postal_Addresses
>
>It covers more than house numbers, i.e. it includes streets, postal
>codes, etc., even countries).
>
>However, the proposal does not allow putting some house numbers on a map
>and having the rest be interpolated); this should, IMO, be handled
>differently (and discussed at
>http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Proposed_features/House_numbers).
>
>Due to the nature of postal addresses, the proposal overlaps with the
>tagging of geographic areas, such as countries, regions, etc.
>
>Claus

I don’t wish to put you off from what is actually an important feature but
my view is that it will be difficult to get people to stick to a regimented
format that requires up to 20 tag entries for each address. I'm hoping we
can be much more clever than that and find a simple way of resolving to an
address without all the extra baggage.

I'm also not keen on using someone else's tag codes where these are not in
plan language. Having a1, a2 etc tags is simply not intuitive for a
contributor or a user.

The other issue is data duplication. Why do we need overlap? If there is
something already in the database that can form part of the address why not
use that?

Cheers

Andy