99% of the time an address is just a “unique” opaque identifier. You ingest the address, then you print it on the parcel. You avoid manipulating or trying to interpret it too much.
A system that attempts to codify address to a standard that can’t express all addresses (including their nuance) is useful. You can’t trust any analytics created from it, because by its nature, address that can’t be interpreted will appear in geographic clusters, and thus skew all your stats.
You can however collect address as opaque strings, and optionally request extra data of a know format (like zipcode or postal code) which is generally considered part of the address. You can then produce stats only on those well know identifiers, and ignore the rest.
But doing that doesn’t require a complicated address type, or supporting address manipulations or any other crap like that. It just requires a free text box, and a separate postal code box.
The most important thing to recognise is that any arbitrary address will fit many different address conventions, but each of those conventions will result in a different location. It practically impossible to definitively interpret an arbitrary address correctly, without significant amounts of additional local context. So its best not to bother, and let the postal workers figure it out using their local knowledge.
Well, in my case, analytics for planning/scheduling of operations. I need to figure out which service points to cluster together. I need to point out that I specifically don't deal with parcels. Occasional individual outliers (some of these points DO need specifically GPS coordinates because occasionally there's an item like "the side of a shed on a parking lot", where the parking lot doesn't have a postal address) can be dealt with, but having, say, 99.5-99.9% ("best effort") systematization is very useful, especially when looking at how to migrate former units of work (which might involve fighting some organizational structures in a large national company). Without this it's impossible for me for example to estimate the objective function difference between a system that routes operations completely arbitrarily with optimal route length and a system that uses somewhat sub-optimal routes but with vastly lesser "human complexity"; for example, with routes spanning a small set of roads) that doesn't need that much automation (a paper list of locations in order - the status quo of the former system).
> The most important thing to recognise is that any arbitrary address will fit many different address conventions, but each of those conventions will result in a different location.
In my case it definitely should not do that, even with different conventions. Maybe that's one of those international things.
99% of the time an address is just a “unique” opaque identifier. You ingest the address, then you print it on the parcel. You avoid manipulating or trying to interpret it too much.
A system that attempts to codify address to a standard that can’t express all addresses (including their nuance) is useful. You can’t trust any analytics created from it, because by its nature, address that can’t be interpreted will appear in geographic clusters, and thus skew all your stats.
You can however collect address as opaque strings, and optionally request extra data of a know format (like zipcode or postal code) which is generally considered part of the address. You can then produce stats only on those well know identifiers, and ignore the rest.
But doing that doesn’t require a complicated address type, or supporting address manipulations or any other crap like that. It just requires a free text box, and a separate postal code box.
The most important thing to recognise is that any arbitrary address will fit many different address conventions, but each of those conventions will result in a different location. It practically impossible to definitively interpret an arbitrary address correctly, without significant amounts of additional local context. So its best not to bother, and let the postal workers figure it out using their local knowledge.