A few months ago the AGI Addressing SIG visited both Intelligent Addressing and Ordnance Survey to discuss the industry’s concerns regarding the failure of these two organisations to reach an agreement on a single source of addressing truth (the National Spatial Addressing Infrastructure). You can find their report here
OS who have been taking a bit of a bashing recently have now published a detailed response which can be found here – they make some good points.
I think the problem is that no one data set can satisfy everyone’s requirements for a single source of addressing information. Not every application requires a postal address or the location of a ratable property e.g. emergency services being called to an incident “by the fountain in the centre of the park”. I beleive the solution is to abondon the myth of the single source of truth and start to think about ways of working with multiple sources of truth. Web Services?
I am not sure who are the goodies and baddies in this saga or even if there are any, hence the question in my title
