Towards an international address standard

Abstract

Address standards have been developed and are still being developed by a number of countries (e.g. South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Denmark and the United States of America) and international organizations (e.g. Universal Postal Union (UPU), International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards. (OASIS)). More recently, these standards have tended to include geospatial components and to cater for other forms of service delivery and not just postal, such as goods delivery, connecting utilities, routing emergency services and providing a reference context for presenting other information. The time is right for bringing these various initiatives together to develop one, common international address standard. Such a standard will promote interoperability and reusability of address-related software tools, by providing one common framework for their developers. The standard will facilitate the development of spatial data infrastructures (SDIs), particularly those that span national borders, and facilitate data discovery through geospatial portals. An international address standard will help developing countries without widespread addressing systems speed up the process of assigning addresses and maintaining address data bases. An international address standard will have significant benefits for global business as well as for government and international organizations. For example, a common standard would improve address management and quality for online retailers and courier companies that deliver all over the world. Also, a standard enables seamless access to address information across regional and national boundaries, which is vital in disaster management and emergency situations. We present here a comparison of current address-related standards, highlighting their commonalities and differences. Drawing from current experiences with these standards, we highlight the benefits of an international address standard to the economy, society and governance. Finally, we explore the different options for developing such a standard and propose a potential scope for the standard.

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