Various countries and international organizations have address standards or are developing them. An address is needed for many more applications than just postal delivery, such as: goods delivery; connecting utilities; opening bank accounts; voting; visiting friends; and providing a reference context for presenting other information. The benefits of an international address standards include: enabling address interoperability across boundaries; reducing service delivery costs; enabling development of addressing tools (including open source); and assisting countries with inadequate addressing systems to implement and maintain them. The idea is not to develop one address structure imposed on everyone, but rather a framework and vocabulary for describing address data around the world, to enable interoperability. The South African address standard, SANS 1883, does not aim at devising a new system of addressing or building a national address database, but rather at enabling interoperability in address data. The standard defines twelve address types currently used in South Africa, both official and unofficial. A paper exploring the possibilities of an international address standard was presented at the GSDI-10 conference in Trinidad in February 2008. An ISO Workshop on address standards was held in Copenhagen in May 2008, attached to the meetings of ISO/TC 211, Geographic information/ Geomatics. This paper reports on these activities and others, considering issues such as:
Is an international address standard feasible?
Should it be descriptive, prescriptive, or both?
What mechanism should be used for developing it?
What should it include (e.g: vocabular, ontology; geo-referencing and a reference model)?
Reference:
Cooper, AK and Coetzee, S. 2008. South African address standard and initiatives towards an international address standard. Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Conference, FOSS4G, Cape Town, South Africa, 29 September - 3 October 2008, pp 13
Cooper, A. K., & Coetzee, S. (2008). South African address standard and initiatives towards an international address standard. Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Conference. http://hdl.handle.net/10204/2785
Cooper, Antony K, and S Coetzee. "South African address standard and initiatives towards an international address standard." (2008): http://hdl.handle.net/10204/2785
Cooper AK, Coetzee S, South African address standard and initiatives towards an international address standard; Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Conference; 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10204/2785 .
Paper presented at the 2008 Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Conference 29 September - 3 October 2008 "Open Source Geospatial: An Option for Developing Nations", Cape Town International Convention Centre, Cape Town, South Africa