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

[Peter Wendorff]

  On 19.08.2010 01:05, John F. Eldredge wrote:
> When you say "process a nearby-search for the street name", how broadly is "nearby" interpreted?
...it depends ;)
At first: Of course you're right.
> Nashville, TN, USA, where I live, has a number of instances of streets that were split by later construction.  For example, McGavock Pike extends both north and south of the airport; the airport construction replaced the middle portion of the street, resulting in a gap of about three miles between the two sections.  Also, since the city's expansion caused it to swallow up a number of smaller communities, there are some duplicate street names that have to be distinguished between by the postal code (referred to as the Zip Code).  I also know of at least one case where a street number occurs more than once on the same long street, but with different postal codes and, originally, different town names (the road in question was originally the highway connecting the two small towns).
Let's distinct two use cases:
1) I search for a house in a database. For that I only need the 
address-information of the house, allowing full search, leading to the 
node or polygon. - should be clear.
2) I want to get a route to a particular address. That't a little more 
difficult, and here the association to the street is needed. I want to 
distinct further:
2.a) The address is - as often the case in urban countries, nearby the 
street and there is no other street with the same name around - the 
simple approach would be enough described earlier.
2.b) The house is far away from the street and the address-information 
is not enough to determine the associated OSM-way. In that cases - 
especially when the house is several hundrets of meters away from the 
street I prefer to add a driveway (highway=service) or footpath to the 
house's entrance, as the house is found independent of the street 
(compare use case 1); the navigation should prefer to navigate directly 
to the target's object.

Additionally at least in Germany a street does not have a postal code, 
but each address has. A street can be summarized to have a particular 
postal code, as that's the usual description (1-22 Main Street: postal 
code: 12345), but there are even streets not having a postal code where 
no house is attached.

regards
Peter