[OSM-talk] Representing places with no housenumber
Christoph Hormann
osm at imagico.de
Fri Aug 24 09:38:49 UTC 2018
On Friday 24 August 2018, Rory McCann wrote:
> >>
> >> 35% of addresses in Ireland aren't unique.
> >
> > I strongly suspect we have a different understanding of either
> > 'address' or 'uniqueness' here.
>
> Possibly. The Irish definition is "a property has the same address
> with a least one other property". I'm not talking about 2 postboxes
> that are beside each other in an apartment block, but 2 houses which
> could be a distance apart. Post/Packages is delivered partially based
> on surname, or "local knowledge" 😉. It is/was a pain. The new
> postcode ("eircode") will help. Now, you may say the surname is part
> of the address, but what happens when someone moves house? And we
> shouldn't put surnames into OSM. So the "address" isn't unique. I
> don't bring it up to disprove you or argue, just to point out that
> the world is weird. 🙂
Obviously there are large parts of the world without addresses and also
large parts with what you might call 'partial addresses'. But i would
see it from a practical point of view: If something you call an
address does not fulfill the main function of an address (to address a
specific place) it is something fundamentally different from what is
widely understood and tagged as an address. Therefore i think (but it
is obviously not up to me to decide that) that it would be better if in
OSM we'd distinguish between unique addresses and partial/non-unique
addresses. Therefore i still think in these cases tagging
noaddress=yes and documenting the associated street of a property or
any other partial address information in a different way might be a
better approach.
And i fully agree that this is weird because for a country like Ireland
it is obviously not a matter of the Irish society not having been able
to create a system of unique addresses. Still you have not done so for
a long time. This is quite remarkable. And it probably will get
weirder in the future - not so much because of this fashion of encoded
coordinate systems but because of digital technology increasingly
allowing dynamically connecting people with locations (and Amazon will
just send you your order to whereever you are - or where you are likely
to be when the order is shipped).
--
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/
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