[OSM-talk] Skip geographical (redundant) address tags

[Felix Hartmann]

On 03.05.2011 10:09, Thomas Davie wrote:
> On 3 May 2011, at 08:57, Jaak Laineste wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> It looks like trivial suggestion, but could not find any past
>> discussions with quick search.
>>
>> Is there good reason to add addr:country, addr:county, addr:city and
>> other regional tags to all the address tags, if OSM database already
>> has administrative regions for given area? These admin areas already
>> create implicit relation, which can be used in any application to add
>> city,country,district,state and other regions. So buildings would have
>> only addr:street, addr:housenumber (and possibly house:housename and
>> addr:full tags). Depending on country, addr:postcode could be
>> geographical also.
> Searching a database for a way that surrounds a potentially enormous area (certainly enormous in the case of country) when you want to find out "what city/country/... is this in" is *far* less efficient than simply looking at the tags.  Plus, Addresses are not always as straightforward as you make out, it's not possible to tell which administrative areas should be included in an address by simply looking at which ones happen to encompass the building.
>
> Bob
> _______________________________________________
+1

Look at all current implementations. If the address is not tagged 
completly (country, state, city, street) then programs are lost, and 
boundaries are too often wrong or incomplete or if someone deletes them 
accidentally (or renames them slightly) all data inside the boundary 
wouldn't have an address anymore. Plus it takes a lot of computation 
time, to put boundary information onto objects inside.