Name/Address Standards

We are looking for some best practices for how to collect name and
address data that will accomodate international information. For
example, how many name fields are suggested? What are the lengths? How
many address lines? Etc. Can anyone point me in the direction of
standards that we could use?

Thank you!

There are no international standards for adresses - every nation has
its own standard (e.g. BS 7666 for the UK). This is because every
nation has developed its own ways of encoding postal information. The
basic information required vaies enormously; even the concepts may
vary from nation to nation. For example, in some countries, your
postal address relates to the route of the deliverer not to the
street.

The nearest to an international standard is ISO 19112, but I doubt
that will help you.

Paul Cooper

On 7 Jul 2006 18:54:20 -0700, katherine.hancock@gmail.com wrote:

While there is no international standard for addressing, there ar two
new draft international standards for expressing names and addresses
addresses in a standardized (interoperable) way. These are the
extensible Address Language (xAL v3.0) and the extensible Name and
Address Language (xNAL v3.0). Check out the Oasis web site location at
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=ciq .

Also, if a lighter-weight XML based mechanism is required for encoding
and communicating addresses, check out the OGC Location Services core
specification
(http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=8836 ) and check
out how to deal with addresses.

In both the OGC and OASIS cases, these standards are designed to work
pretty much any where in the world.

As these are not fixed format content standards, they are very flexible
for expressing addresses.

Cheers

Carl Reed
OGC



katherine.hancock@gmail.com wrote: