On 19.08.2010 01:05, John F. Eldredge wrote:
When you say "process a nearby-search for the street name", how broadly is
"nearby" interpreted?
...it depends ;)
At first: Of course you're right.
Nashville, TN, USA, where I live, has a number of instances of streets that
were split by later construction. For example, McGavock Pike extends both
north and south of the airport; the airport construction replaced the middle
portion of the street, resulting in a gap of about three miles between the two
sections. Also, since the city's expansion caused it to swallow up a number of
smaller communities, there are some duplicate street names that have to be
distinguished between by the postal code (referred to as the Zip Code). I also
know of at least one case where a street number occurs more than once on the
same long street, but with different postal codes and, originally, different
town names (the road in question was originally the highway connecting the two
small towns).
Let's distinct two use cases:
1) I search for a house in a database. For that I only need the
address-information of the house, allowing full search, leading to the
node or polygon. - should be clear.
2) I want to get a route to a particular address. That't a little more
difficult, and here the association to the street is needed. I want to
distinct further:
2.a) The address is - as often the case in urban countries, nearby the
street and there is no other street with the same name around - the
simple approach would be enough described earlier.
2.b) The house is far away from the street and the address-information
is not enough to determine the associated OSM-way. In that cases -
especially when the house is several hundrets of meters away from the
street I prefer to add a driveway (highway=service) or footpath to the
house's entrance, as the house is found independent of the street
(compare use case 1); the navigation should prefer to navigate directly
to the target's object.
Additionally at least in Germany a street does not have a postal code,
but each address has. A street can be summarized to have a particular
postal code, as that's the usual description (1-22 Main Street: postal
code: 12345), but there are even streets not having a postal code where
no house is attached.
regards
Peter
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