On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 9:32 AM, Chris Kantarjiev <c...@speedgauge.net> wrote: > >> I am not sure there ever was an era of *globally* valid taxonomies. >> Locally, yes, they would be very useful. For example, would work in the US. >> But, I am in Northern India right now, and jeebus... would never work given >> the chaos here. Here is a real address >> >> E1/F,<-- house number >> "Y" Block<-- because the building looks like two Ys from the air >> [1] >> River Bank Colony, >> Near Letter Box<-- seriously, am not making it up >> City, State, Postcode, etc. > > > You don't have to look to India to find this. The town of Port Clyde, Maine > doesn't have house numbers - or didn't when I rented a house there some > years ago. I was staying for a month and wanted to ship a "real" computer, > and was told to tell FedEx "The white house across and down from the Post > Office"
In the US the lack of addresses is endemic in rural areas. Many people live on traversable paths that are not even official roads; in the mountain West these tend to be 19th century mining trails, in other regions they may have been well-used paths to hunting areas. Fortunately, the USGS keeps track of these unofficial roads and paths so they do exist in a database somewhere and it is usually possible to get delivery. In addition to the relative addressing from a well-known location scheme above, many areas have something analogous to the "Rural Route" model the postal service uses which maintains a local map of deliverable locations even if those locations are not on a government sanctioned road. Local knowledge of the transport network. Even though it is often technically illegal to do so, commonly used trails are actively maintained by residents so that they are traversable year around by ordinary vehicles. -- J. Andrew Rogers _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list Geowanking@geowanking.org http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
