Re: [Geopriv] "Postal" and "Jurisdicational" civic locations - reprise

[Henning Schulzrinne <hgs at cs.columbia.edu>]

The usage of 'postal' has caused a fair amount of confusion, since it  
tends to conflate several different things:

(1) a street address, possibly with a different postal community name  
(PCN), which we already have in PIDF;

(2) special street-like addresses, such as rural carrier routes, that  
are only used for postal delivery and are meaningless to anybody else;

(3) post office boxes

(4) short addresses that only contain, say, organization name, city  
and zip code, such as those used for the Internal Revenue Service in  
the United States (example: IRS, Fresno, CA 93888-0002)

Our definition of 'civic' has always only included (1), as only that  
form satisfies the pizza delivery test. If you can't get pizza  
delivered to it, it's beyond our scope. If it weren't so long and  
unwieldy, we'd say a "(common) civic address as used by the postal  
service".

Brian has asked this before and the only interesting case that we are  
concerned about is whether there are multiple interesting forms of  
(1) that we need to distinguish, i.e., that are not just internal  
aliases of each other. (Aliases can occur, for example, if a street  
is renamed and the old name is still accepted for postal delivery.)  
So far, the conclusion seems to be 'no'.

Fortunately, we don't have to solve this problem now. If a new  
address-like place naming form is discovered somewhere, we can add it  
later, once we actually understand it and can name it.

In many cases, we'll only need to add information elements, as long  
as each (1) civic address has a single defined value. For example, if  
we wanted to add a carrier route indication, we can just add a  
corresponding label, since each house/apartment is on exactly one  
route. Clearly, for PO boxes, there is no such direct equivalence.

In short, I don't see a need for going postal.

Henning

On Sep 13, 2007, at 7:51 PM, Stark, Barbara wrote:

> The reason for wanting a postal address would likely be because the  
> device user wants to have something mailed or delivered. If this is  
> true, then the goal of a "postal" request should be to get the  
> location where mail and packages should be sent, and not  
> necessarily the actual location where the device is. These  
> locations may be the same or they may be different, as Jerome and  
> Guy described.
>
> On the other hand, if we insist that postal formulations must still  
> describe the actual physical location and not necessarily a mailing  
> address, then I don't see what compelling use there is for such a  
> distinction.
>
> If people want the mailing address, I can see the potential use,  
> but I don't care whether we do that or not. On the other hand, if  
> people want a postal-only formulation of a physical location, which  
> may or may not be useful for shipping packages and sending mail,  
> then I don't get it.
>
> As a potential LIS implementer, I don't really see the need for the  
> complexity of having separate street names stored for various  
> locations, for the special cases where they differ. Which means, I  
> wouldn't plan on it. Let someone use a street-name mapping  
> function. Besides, the location data we have in our database has 9- 
> digit zip in most cases. It's real easy to do a reverse lookup to  
> get the official postal street name, given a 9-digit zip code.
>
> So let me ask -- is "postal" supposed to be the address where  
> people at the current location get mail? If it can't be used to  
> send mail, then where's the value in providing a LO with only the  
> postal fields in it?
> Barbara
>
> From: Winterbottom, James [mailto:James.Winterbottom at andrew.com]
> Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2007 4:39 PM
> To: Stark, Barbara; Marc Berryman; Mary Barnes; geopriv at ietf.org
> Subject: RE: [Geopriv] "Postal" and "Jurisdicational" civic  
> locations - reprise
>
> Hi Barbara,
>
>
>
> I am a little confused by this response.
>
>
>
> Expressing the civic location types in the PIDF-LO is one issue.
>
> Being able to request just a jurisdictional civic, or just a postal  
> civic using HELD is a different issue.
>
>
>
> I don’t think issue one is really resolved, but I also don’t think  
> that it has any direct bearing on issues 2.
>
>
>
> Your last sentence makes me think that you see some benefit in  
> leaving jurisdictionalCivic and postalCivic in HELD. Is that right?
>
>
>
> Cheers
>
> James
>
>
>
>
>
> From: Stark, Barbara [mailto:bs7652 at att.com]
> Sent: Friday, 14 September 2007 3:51 AM
> To: Marc Berryman; Mary Barnes; geopriv at ietf.org
> Subject: RE: [Geopriv] "Postal" and "Jurisdicational" civic  
> locations - reprise
>
>
>
> The impression I was left with, was that it was possible to  
> describe a particular physical civic location with a single PIDF- 
> LO. Within that LO there may be jurisdictional and postal fields.  
> These are already defined in the PIDF-LO docs. The street address  
> (and possibly the jurisdictional community name) may have several  
> (not just 2) "correct" ways to express it, but it should be  
> possible to translate from one to another, so only one needs to be  
> kept in the LIS.
>
>
>
> What appeared to be touched on, but never really discussed, was  
> whether there needed to be the ability to say "I would like to have  
> the mailing address for where I am." As Guy and Jerome mentioned,  
> the location of the mailbox does not necessarily coincide with the  
> physical location of the device making the request.
>
>
>
> So, I don't see value in separate jurisdictional and postal  
> requests to describe a single physical location, because both  
> should be expressible within a single PIDF-LO. There MAY be value  
> in being able to request the mailing address for a physical location.
>
> Barbara
>
>
>
> From: Marc Berryman [mailto:MBerryman at 911.org]
> Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2007 12:08 PM
> To: Mary Barnes; geopriv at ietf.org
> Subject: RE: [Geopriv] "Postal" and "Jurisdicational" civic  
> locations - reprise
>
> Mary,
>
>  I do not think that Jurisdiction and Postal need to be the same,  
> often they are not the same, since postal rarely follows the same  
> “boundaries” as jurisdictional. Since they may, or may not, be the  
> same is the reason they are both included. You can not assume they  
> are the same.
>
>
>
> Marc B
>
>
>
> Marc Berryman, ENP
> Geographic Information Systems
> Greater Harris County 9-1-1 Emergency Network
> Houston, Texas      (713) 407-2254
> mberryman at 911.org
>
> From: Mary Barnes [mailto:mary.barnes at nortel.com]
> Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2007 11:02 AM
> To: geopriv at ietf.org
> Subject: [Geopriv] "Postal" and "Jurisdicational" civic locations -  
> reprise
>
>
>
> Hi all,
>
> This thread never seemed to conclude with clear consensus as to  
> whether folks see a need for both these specific location types  
> rather than being able to use a common "civic" locationType.     I  
> went back through the threads and the majority of the responses  
> indicated that both of the values should be the same (with Canada  
> being the exception?).   Since the thread did diverge somewhat  
> (into how conversions etc. are done), I would like to do a quick  
> query to see if folks are okay with removing those two values from  
> the locationType in the HELD draft?
>
> And, just to be precise, we're proposing changing locationType from  
> a set of {any, civic, geodetic, postalCivic, jurisdictionalCivic,  
> locationURI} to a set of
>
> {any, civic, geodetic, locationURI}.
>
> Regards,
> Mary
> Editor HELD
>
>
>
>
>
>
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