[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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