Towards good principles for the design of a national addressing scheme

Abstract

Traditionally, humans used an address as a direction to a building and its occupants. The advent of computers opened up a whole new range of possibilities, such as routing and vehicle navigation, automated processing of mail items, utility planning and maintenance, spatial demographic analysis and geo-marketing. Addressing schemes vary in different parts of the world, such as referencing to a road network or to a hierarchy of administrative areas; in informal settlements addresses can be informal, variable and creative. Addresses are used for a wide variety of purposes, often with conflicting needs, such as required geographical precision and accuracy. Various stakeholders are involved in both designing and maintaining an addressing scheme, including town planners, city managers, utility companies, postal operators and addressees. Some countries and international organizations have address standards and there is a process within the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) looking at bringing them together into a suite of international standards for addressing. In this paper the authors present a number of issues that have to be considered when designing an addressing scheme. Drawing on these, they show that there is a trade-off between people, the physical world and its digital representation when designing an addressing scheme. Based on these findings, they list a number of good principles for the design of a national addressing scheme.