[OSM-talk] collection/street relation: which one to use?

[Peter Wendorff]

  On 18.08.2010 19:21, Anthony wrote:
>   put a reference to the street into the way
> for the building, not a way to put a reference to the building into
> the way for the street.  One possibility is to just use
> addr:street=way:37863 or addr:street=relation:28917.  But as there
> would be no maintenance of referential integrity, that wouldn't be
> without its dangers.
Isn't addr:street="Main Street" enough?

pro's:
- to search for a house, only searching through local tags (of nodes or 
areas describing buildings/housenumbers) is enough.
- to search for the associated street of the house process a 
nearby-search for the street-name, as the same streetname usually 
doesn't appear twice in a city
- maintaining is easy as changing ways for the street don't care.

Navigation systems should IMHO do some preprocessing to the data - means 
e.g. connecting houses to nodes at the street for routing.

con's:
references in attributes are error prone, I fear.
1) some people reuse old ways when editing (should not be, but is often 
the case)
2) deletions, edits and additions would break the relation, if not 
maintained carefully, what's a lot of work.

So I prefer to add the street name to the street (as name) and 
addr:street to the building/shop etc.

regards
Peter