Re: Civic Address for V2

>
>
> prd,pod,sts - can be coalesced with street (e.g. 'Carriage Drive  
> North')

It can be, but makes dealing with street abbreviations much more  
cumbersome. I now have to parse
Carriage Dr N
and
No Carriage Drive

and decide which parts might be real names and which are just standard  
abbreviations for places. Maybe plausibly easy in English, a pain if  
multiple languages are involved. If I separate them, I can have a  
simple lookup table without worrying that

47 Platz Street

(which exists in the lovely town on Toowoomba, Australia...)

is not the concatenation of the German word for "place" with something  
else.

>
> hno - street number
> hns - coalesced with street number  (e.g. '52B')

probably relatively harmless

>
> lmk, loc, flr, nam - can be combined into a separate field  
> ('details'?)

These all have very different meanings. If you combine those, you  
suddenly have to understand the various-language versions of "floor",  
for example, to figure out which part is the floor number. That makes  
dealing with international addresses far more painful than needed.  
Everybody will be ordering them in their favorite order, so you can't  
just pick the first element.

Similarly, distinguishing algorithmically and reliably between 'nam'  
and 'lmk' is between hard and impossible. Example:

Mall of America
Mallrat Store

Which is which?

Among other problems, this is makes it far more difficult to compare  
civic addresses with each other, to see if they are the same or "close  
enough". I may decide that I don't care about the floor, but certainly  
care about the building name. Catch-all terms are also likely to  
encourage dumping all kinds of non-address data into this. "Details"  
will likely attract free text like "The overpriced store with mall- 
shaped bed linens."

>
> postalcode - postalcode
>
>
> So now we have 9 fields with understandable names. Alec's proposal had
> 6 fields. Perhaps we can expand his proposal to accommodate the
> missing fields as a compromise?
>
> What do you think?

We are getting closer, I suppose. You haven't even touched the various  
international naming conventions, such as "Sub-Branch road name". We  
found out during our discussions that treating them as "just streets"  
was a recipe for confusion and required far more local cultural and  
language knowledge.

I think it would be a good idea to have more memorable names for  
these, but that seems pretty trivial. I don't see much of a problem of  
understanding with labeling something "floor" or "landmark".

Would it be too much to ask that you consider consulting the GEOPRIV  
archives, given that we have had these discussions at length there? I  
suspect you would expect the same if somebody were to enter into an  
area you consider your expertise.

>
>
> Thanks,
> Andrei
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 4 March 2009 02:26:24 UTC