6.4.22.5 Addresses

From Geostandards

The current version of the data specification is version 3.0. The document is available here.

This page currently contains the executive summary from the data specification document:

Purpose

The INSPIRE Directive (2007/2/EC, 14.03.2007) defines the spatial data theme Addresses as the: “Location of properties based on address identifiers, usually by road name, house number, postal code.”

This data specification on Addresses provides the basis for the development of the part of the Implementing Rules related to the spatial data theme Addresses. The entire data specification will be published as implementation guidelines accompanying the Implementing Rule on the Interoperability of Spatial Data Sets and Services according to Article 7(1) of the INSPIRE Directive.

The data specification has been prepared by the Thematic Working Group on Addresses (TWG-AD), a multinational team of experts in the field drawn from different parts of the European Union. Their brief has been to create a data specification which requires no additional data capture by the European Union member states (Member States) and in this way it is designed to minimise the effort required to supply conformant spatial data.

Addresses serve several generic purposes, including: location, identification, jurisdiction, sorting and ordering, and emergency response.

The data specification on Addresses is required to facilitate the interoperability of address information between the Member States. Although all national or local address systems share similar concepts and general properties, differences exist in formal and informal standards, rules, schemas and data models within Europe.

Scope and description

The data specification defines an address as: “An identification of the fixed location of a property, e.g. plot of land, building, part of building, way of access or other construction, by means of a structured composition of geographic names and identifiers.”

A number of different object types can be related to property. The most commonly recognised types that have addresses are land parcels and buildings (including flats or apartments). In some countries additional objects have an address, such as street furniture, water pumping stations, mooring places, car parks and agricultural barns. Collectively, objects which can have addresses are referred to as addressable objects.

The spatial data theme Addresses is not isolated from other spatial data themes and it has a useful property where it can be used to link and join information from other data sets. The data specification is concerned with the structure of an address and does not attempt to define the structure of the addressable object to which it relates. The data specification does though include associations from the address to the two INSPIRE themes Cadastral Parcels and Buildings.

Input into data specification development

The development of the data specification is based on a variety of sources. One of them is reference material, provided by the organisations from the Member States and other countries. This includes the national standards related to addresses and geographic information; the practice from existing address registers or address reference systems and international organisations; the International Standardisation Organisation’s ISO 19100 series of standards for geographic information; the reference material from international associations and consortia and the Generic Conceptual Model.

Since its recent inception, there has also been close collaboration, through common members and joint workshops, with the EURADIN (EURopean ADdress INfrastructure) project.

The evaluation of the existing address systems was extended with a survey and analysis of some of the Member States, describing the address referencing of real world address assignments. These are provided as examples of current best practice and so facilitate implementation by other Member States.

The present lack of well-defined user requirements, especially related to those policies and activities that may have a direct or indirect impact on the environment, acted as a constraint on the TWG-AD. This was to some extent bridged with use cases, built on the domain knowledge of the group. The use cases are related to the several generic purposes of addresses, including the business and system usage of addresses and how they are specified for areas such as environmental policies (tree preservation), cross-border cooperation (cross-border emergency service), disaster management, fire protection management, support of disaster management and flood prevention, hazardous materials management, fireside permission, postal collection or delivery, search for addresses and address changes.

It is acknowledged by the TWG that the data specification therefore may need to be developed, according to further user requirements identified in the future.

The core of the spatial data theme Addresses and the relationships

The overall concept of this data specification is that an address has a “locator”, e.g. an address number that enables a user to distinguish it from the neighbour addresses; and a geographic position, which enables an application to locate the address spatially.

To identify the address unambiguously in a wider context an address must be associated with a number of “address components” that define its location within a certain geographic area. Each of the address components represents a spatial identifier as for example the name of a road, district, postcode, municipality, region or country.

Four subclasses of address components are defined: administrative unit name, address area name18, thoroughfare name and postal descriptor.

This generic approach of addresses and address components supports the variety of the existing addresses systems (simple or complex) in the Member States.

In an address, the “locator” could be a systematic designator (like a number), it could be a name (like a building name) or it could be both. It is possible also for an address to have several locators, for instance as a hierarchy of building name, entrance number and flat number.

The geographic position of an address is represented by a spatial point including information on its origins. The point-based spatial representation was adopted for the simplicity of the implementation of the data specification and to reflect the situation in the Member States.

In addition to this, an address has a number of other attributes including a unique identifier (to easily distinguish between instances), possibly an alternative identifier, a status attribute and a number of life cycle attributes.

Two types of temporal life-cycle information are included: 1) the content specific life–cycle information describing the real world address (when this version of the real world address is valid); and 2) the temporal information on the changes in the database or spatial data set (when the item was inserted, superseded or retired).

The address components have a number of general properties (attributes) which are exchanged for all components and some attributes that are specific for each sub-type, like e.g. the post code attribute which is specific for postal descriptors.

The common properties to all components include an identifier, an alternative identifier, the status of the component and the temporal life-cycle information (using the same concept as for the address).

The data specification on Addresses encounters relationships with four spatial data themes defined in Annex I of the INSPIRE Directive, namely: Cadastral parcels, which may be associated to the address itself, as well as Administrative units, Geographic names and Transport networks which could be associated to the address components.

Additionally, the specification includes also the relationship between the address and the spatial data theme Buildings, that is part of the Annex III of the INSPIRE Directive. At the present time, this relationship is modelled as a temporary “placeholder” until the data specification on Buildings is initiated.

The data specification for Addresses is designed with the intention of encompassing the requirements of all Member States.

As addresses are administered and managed differently in the Member States, often by different organisations and under different laws, there is likely to be an impact on the complexity of the resulting data specification and application schema. It has, however, remained the focus of the TWG-AD to make it as easily understood and as flexible as possible.

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