Review of Address Standards
Introduction
Most of the text in the review of address standards is from the Review summary of the ISO 19160 Addressing PWI project (ISO/TC 211 N 3188).
Addresses are one of the most common ways of describing a location. Address assignment schemes vary from country to country: in many Euro-centric countries reference to a road network in the address is common, while addresses in countries such as Japan and Korea (though Korea is moving away from this) comprise a hierarchy of administrative areas without reference to a thoroughfare. Addresses are used for a wide variety of purposes: postal delivery, emergency response, customer relationship management, land administration, utility planning and maintenance, to name a few. Refer to Figure 1.
Figure 1 Examples of address uses
Sometimes a geographic overview of addresses at a large scale is required, e.g. land administration and utility planning and maintenance. To deliver mail or respond to emergencies, the priority is to accurately identify delivery and access points. In a customer analysis, individual delivery points are sometimes completely discarded and only the place name in the address is of relevance, while for mail delivery and customer analysis addresses tend to also include names of parties and are constrained by the formatting rules (address label). Standardization of such formatting rules has a great impact on the efficiency of address label rendition (writing) and recognition (reading) and therefore on the overall efficiency of the delivery process.
Quite a few stakeholders are involved in address standardization. In the run-up to this project, a workshop considering the issues related to an international address standard was held under the auspices of Working Group 7, Information Communities, of ISO/TC 211, Geographic information/Geomatics and was hosted by the National Survey and Cadastre in May 2008 in Copenhagen, Denmark (Coetzee, Cooper and Lind 2008). The workshop brought together people involved in the development of address standards around the world, to give their perspectives on an international address standard. Figure 2 illustrates the variety of stakeholders involved in addressing: for assigning the address (local governments, postal operators, etc.); for using addresses in various ways (customer service providers and electronic business, local and national governments, utility service providers, election commissions, etc.); and finding the address (citizens, delivery and emergency response service providers, etc.). Through the workshop and collaboration with other initiatives, such as the Universal Postal Union’s ‘Addressing the world – An address for everyone’, most of the identified stakeholders were involved in the project.
Figure 2 Stakeholders in addressing
The benefits of address standardization are well documented, including benefits to the economy, society and governance (CEBR 2006, Barr 2007, Coetzee & Cooper 2007a, Coetzee et al. 2008b, Lind 2007, Nicholson 2007, EURADIN 2009, DECA 2010). These benefits are not restricted to interoperability of existing address data in the developed world, but also provide guidelines to developing countries that still have to develop addressing systems. Thus, participation and perspectives from both developed and developing countries are important.