From XML.org News - Towards an International Address Standard

[kumar.sydney@gmail.com]

Towards an International Address Standard
Serena Coetzee, Antony Cooper (et al.), GSDI-10 Conference Paper

This paper was presented at the Tenth International Conference for
Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI-10). "Address standards have been
developed and are still being developed by a number of countries (e.g.,
South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Denmark and the
United States of America) and international organizations —
e.g., Universal Postal Union (UPU), International Organization for
Standardization (ISO) and the Organization for the Advancement of
Structured Information Standards (OASIS). More recently, these standards
have tended to include geospatial components and to cater for other
forms of service delivery and not just postal, such as goods delivery,
connecting utilities, routing emergency services and providing a
reference context for presenting other information. The time is right
for bringing these various initiatives together to develop one, common
international address standard. Such a standard will promote
interoperability and reusability of address-related software tools, by
providing one common framework for their developers. The standard will
facilitate the development of spatial data infrastructures (SDIs),
particularly those that span national borders, and facilitate data
discovery through geospatial portals. An international address standard
will help developing countries without widespread addressing systems
speed up the process of assigning addresses and maintaining address data
bases... Table 11 describing ten addressing standards ("Overview of
issues addressed in the address standards") shows that most of the
address standards: include geo-referencing by coordinates; describe all
kinds of addresses (as opposed to only postal addresses); provide data
models; use UML to describe their data models; and use XML as an encoding
format. Some of the standards include metadata and a few of the standards
include data quality, though the trend is to specify data quality measures
in a separate standard... The authors believe that the best approach is
to develop a new international address standard within ISO/TC 211, as
addresses are a fundamental geospatial data theme, and because developing
the standard within ISO will allow the broadest participation from
governments, academia, industry, NGOs, civil society and international
organizations such as UPU and OASIS. Particularly, involvement by
relevant organizations will be encouraged to get the broadest possible
participation. However, developing the international address standard
within ISO implies that copies of the standards must be bought, and we
propose to either develop an abstract standard with regional profiles
or to develop the standard jointly with an organization that makes their
standards available for free. This will help ensure that the standard
gets to the local authorities who ultimately have to implement the
standard in their areas of jurisdiction..."

http://xml.coverpages.org/namesAndAddresses.html#GSDI-10-InternationalAddressStandard
See also Markup Languages for Names and Addresses: http://xml.coverpages.org/namesAndAddresses.html