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.
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
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?
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...
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