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Comment by kamakazizuru | Hacker News Reader

its interesting how a lot of these are from the UK. In Germany on the other hand - every address follows the same format. The only weirdness you run into is that sometimes (Especially in former east german areas) - the numbering of buildings isnt really sequential.

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sure, but you still have problems, even with a well structured system. Postcodes and addresses are designed for delivering mail, but then society tries to shoehorn them into doing other things. As an example consider the query "show me all addresses in the database in Bavaria". It sounds very straight forward, but it isn't because postal address don't contain that info, you have to keep a mapping of postcodes to Länder or whatever other geo unit you want to use. Likewise there are all sorts of very well known places that have no correspondence to official postal directories, for example here in London if I ask someone to meet me in Chinatown they will know exactly where that is. But it doesn't exist as an "official" address.

We (my company Nestoria - a real estate search engine in 8 markets) have to geocode tens of thousands of listings a day all with incomplete or haphazard address info. Here's a talk one of our guys gave a few months ago about how we do it. TL;DR - geocoding real world data is hard

http://www.lokku.com/nestoria-geo-system/

he's going to give a much more detailed talk at the next #geomob if anyone is in London and interested: http://geomobldn.org/post/47481139743/date-set-for-july-geom...

I think Australia also has a very rigid system. I signed up for Telstra prepaid online services, and everything was very strictly validated (including if the street number existed), and almost everything came out of a dropdown (down to a separate one for "is the road called road, lane, street, way, etc"

Nuh-uh. I had this as my address for a while:

  5 Division
  Australian Defence Force Academy
  Department of Defence
  Canberra ACT 2600

Or another one:

  Officer's Mess
  RAAF Williamtown
  Newcastle, NSW

Both military of course. Try sending mail to someone stationed on a boat, uh sorry, ship!

I'm sure various universities, government departments, and companies have similar silly situations. For example I would be willing to bet that you get some very weird addresses in some mining operations.

Ships are usually pretty sane, at least y military standards. Officers' mail tends to be addressed to the wardroom (the Naval equivalent of the Officer's Mess). Other ranks' mail goes to their mess, which is generally designated by bulkhead number and port/starboard. (Rank s, of course, optional, and not expected on civvy mail.) The "street" is the ship's name, city is the home station (and where the mail is sorted and dispatched) and there is usually a separate postal code for each ship. So, for a fictional Canadian Able Seaman:

  Ralph Rackstraw
  19 Starboard,
  HMCS Pinafore,
  CFB Halifax, NS (, CANADA - optional)
  X1X 1X1

The system in Oz at least used to be similar. Which is great if you're actually posted to a vessel. That isn't always the case in Canada; we air types, the folks what flies and fixes the helicopters, are nominally "Air Force" and are seconded to ships for voyages only, remaining on squadron strength back at our home airfield, so unless one is vigilant about changing addresses every few weeks, important mail may be headed to your post box at the barracks while you're at see and to the ship while you're at home.

Thats not true: e.g. "27321 Finkenburg, Germany" no street, no house number. And the Finkenburg is in western Germany, close to Bremen. It was a former Saxenschanze, an artificial hill between Weser and Dike, that is surrounded by water several times a year.

One aspect of German addresses is rather strange, I find as a foreign resident. If a building is split into individual flats, each flat does not have its own number in the address. Letters are addressed to names in a building. We have to deal with the electricity company with designations like Erdgeschoss Links (ground floor, left). They also get rather confused if married people do not have the same surname.

Married people with different names is not a problem: you list all of the names on the name shield. This is also common with WGs (shared accomodation).

The common case that fails badly is where two people in the same apartment block share the same surname. There is no good workaround for this case, especially given the German resistance to putting first names in formal correspondence.

This was the case when I lived in Switzerland as well. My address was just my name at the building's address.

There were 12 units in the building and I don't believe they had numbers. The occupants attached their names to the mailboxes outside the building so the mail carrier knew which box to put things in.

Counterexample: the village Rutha (in Thuringia) seems to have only one un-named street. So its addresses lack the street name field.

Same in Knechtsteden, near Dormagen. It's a former cloister, currently a school, and has no street name in its address.

Any PO-Box address in Germany has an address format different from the normal addresses. Some PO-boxes only have a zip-code and the town. It's still all fairly standardized but exceptions exist.

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