Warin <61sundow...@gmail.com> writes:
> On 12/9/23 03:57, Greg Troxel wrote:
>> The fundamental issue is that there are postal addresses and what might
>> be called "civil addresses" or "physical addresses" ('locational' I
>> understand but is not normal English usage).
> I could not think of a better descriptive 'word' for what I wanted to
> express.
Sure, didn't mean to be unkind. I understood you and was trying to
suggest something that fits for en_GB and en_US both. (I am an en_US
native speaker.)
>> In the US, we also have
>> "911 dispatchable location" which is all about getting there physically
>> and is US-bureaucatic-speak.
>>
>> OSM has decided to tag postal addresses on address points. I find this
>> an odd choice, and I think it really doesn't mean this, as companies
>> that use PO boxes are not tagged that way, but with the street address.
>>
>> The only fix I think of is to have a separate set of tags paddr: and a
>> rule that those should be set if they are different from the addr: tags
>> (which are postal). except postcode, which is a postal-only.
>
> Err the zip/postcode in the UK is a (small) physical area. It is used
> by truck delivery drivers to enter into their GPS to find a route to
> the delivery point. See
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdom
In the UK, yes. In the US, "zip codes" are not technically a physical
area, even though they act like one and most people don't understand
this. They are a set of delivery addresses. They do not always line up
with civil boundaries. You can be in TownA and have a postal address
that has TownA in it but the zip of TownB because that carrier route
handles your mail.
And, addresses on property deeds, etc. do not have zip codes. They are
not part of "civil addresses", only mailing.
I am unclear on whether a UK postcode is part of one's civil/legal
address.
> Possibly the OSM addr thinking is based on the UK where the postal
> address is the physical location?There maybe exceptions to this in the
> UK too?
Likely. Everything in OSM was/is based on UK thinking, and sometimes
that is ok and occasionally it is not.
>> All in all I think it was a mistake to tag postal addresses. Maybe we
>> can just redefine addr:foo to be the physical address, except
>> addr:postcode is the code assigned by the government/monopoly delivery
>> service. And then add some mailing address tag for things that need
>> them.
>
> I do think OSM is more of a location data base. Imaging a personal
> visit to these places with addresses quite some distance (miles) away
> .. nasty. And some of them have more than two locations...
Agreed. And there is also the issue where a physical place has an
address in the normal "drive to it" or "911 dispatchable location"
sense, but has a PO Box in another state that you write to in order to
interact by mail. IMHO it would be completely unreasonable to tag this
PO box address on a store node as addr:foo. If somebody wanted to add
addr_mailing_not_physical:foo
I wouldn't like it but I couldn't say it was super wrong.
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