On Tue, 7 Jan 2020 at 21:00, Colin Smale <colin.sm...@xs4all.nl> wrote:
Royal Mail do not say the Post Town is optional. RM also know of localities
> and dependent localities, which may or may not bear any resemblance to an
> inhabitant's perception of where they live.
>
Yeah, that's what they say. But only house name/number and postcode are
required to uniquely identify a deliverable address. Royal Mail strongly
suggest
you include the other stuff as belt and braces.
>
> [...]
>
>
> Postal counties have been deprecated for years, but are still in many
> people's minds. Metropolitan counties are no longer "administrative".
> Traditional counties maybe? But almost certainly not administrative
> counties.
>
Try buying something online. They want a county. And quite possibly only
let you
choose a county that no longer exists (except as a ceremonial county) such
as Dyfed
rather than the county you're actually in, such as Ceredigion.
>
>
> So if I am now more explicit about my intention to help this discussion
> towards a conclusion.....
>
Actually, you sorta hijacked a discussion about whether to put the address
on a
building or a nearby gatepost. This discussion is probably needed too.
What an address refers to, is different in the UK compared to other
> countries. We will never find a single model to fit the whole world that is
> not abstracted to the point that it becomes useless. Let's stop chasing our
> tails, and accept that.
>
Already have. Long ago. Not sure that what we have, even in the UK, is
entirely
fit for purpose because I have several examples in my own town alone that
don't fit
that model. These are, to some extent, country-specific editor preset
issues: figure
out what works in a given country and persuade the people maintaining the
editors to
adopt it. Yes, I'm simplifying a lot (again).
>
> Back to the philosophical question: Is a normal "address" in OSM: a) for
> delivering letters, or b) for navigation, or c) an identifier of a
> building/premises, or d) something else?
>
The philosophical question is actually should we limit/prohibit any of
those uses? I
think not. We can't force any mapper to add all of the info, but we ought
not to prevent
them from doing so.
Should/could we cater for these different definitions of "address", e.g. by
> having tags like addr:{address_type}:{address_element}? This is a question
> that IMHO is probably best addressed at global level; then let each country
> have its own model within that framework.
>
Gut feeling, without any real analysis, is we don't have address_type, we
just have
address_elements. Because in one country address_element X may be a
critical
component of address_type A but in another country it's a critical
component of
address_type B. Just have address elements and it's up to the consumer to
make
sense of them.
--
Paul
_______________________________________________
Tagging mailing list
Tagging@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
