Introduction

An address is structured information that allows the unambiguous determination of an object for purposes of identification and location (ISO 19160‑1:2015). The objects exist in the physical world (i.e. virtual objects are excluded) and can be outdoor (e.g. a building) or indoor (e.g. an office inside a building).

Addresses provide one of the most common ways to locate and identify an object in the physical world. They are essential for the management of cities, for governance and public administration generally, for service delivery in the public and private sector, and they can give people status or (legal) identity in society. They also play an important role in detecting emerging hotspots and clusters of infected cases during an epidemic or pandemic. Yet, in many parts of the world, addresses do not exist or are poorly maintained, and even if they exist, corresponding address data is often lacking or incomplete. Many stakeholders are involved in address assignment and maintenance, including local governments, postal operators, geographic naming councils, people who live or work at an address, and users of addresses, such as banks, local and national governments, e-commerce, and service providers for utilities, deliveries and emergency response.

This document specifies how to plan, implement and maintain addresses and corresponding address data in order to gain maximum benefits for governance and society in the long run. The aim of this document is to facilitate the design, planning and implementation of address assignment and maintenance by specifying requirements and recommendations for objectives, principles, good practice and a governance framework for assigning and maintaining addresses based on international good practice. Where regional or national standards already exist, this document can complement them.

This document supports the first goal of the United Nations Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM) Integrated Geospatial Information Framework (IGIF) (http://ggim.un.org/), namely, enabling geospatial (address) information governance, policy and institutional arrangements that ensure effective geospatial (address) information management, accommodate individual organizational requirements and arrangements, and that are aligned to national and global policy frameworks.

This document supports the Universal Postal Union’s initiative, “Addressing the World – An Address for Everyone”, which promotes the establishment of national addressing infrastructures to the benefit of all. The document is also useful for those involved in slum upgrading, as addresses are often assigned when housing conditions in settlements are being improved.

In many Euro-centric countries, reference to a road network in the address is common, while addresses in countries such as Japan comprise a hierarchy of administrative areas without reference to a thoroughfare. In countries with vast tracts of land, an address can comprise only a place name or the name of an oasis in a desert. Therefore, this document does not intend to promote uniform addresses across the world. It specifies good governance and management practices for any kind of address so that challenges related to address assignment and maintenance can be resolved consistently and sustainably. The requirements and recommendations in this document are aimed at upholding a long-lasting addressing infrastructure that meets today’s needs for addressing, but can also be used by future generations.

This document is part of the ISO 19160 series on addressing. The other parts in the ISO 19160 series include:

— ISO 19160‑1 , Addressing – Part 1: Conceptual model, which lays out a conceptual model for address information (address model), and provides terms and definitions that describe the concepts in the model. A profile of ISO 19160‑1 is a model that specifies addresses and address data for a specific country, region or application.
— ISO 19160‑3 , Addressing – Part 3: Address data quality, which establishes a set of data quality elements and measures for describing the quality of address data. ISO 19160‑3 also describes procedures for reporting data quality and provides guidelines for the use of the established set of data quality elements and measures for describing the quality of address data. By using ISO 19160‑3 to assess and describe the quality of address data, information about the quality can be shared and the data can be improved accordingly (if necessary).
— ISO 19160‑4 , Addressing – Part 4: International postal address components and template language, which defines key terms for postal addressing, postal address components and constraints on their use. ISO 19160‑4is also published as UPU S42 by the Universal Postal Union. ISO 19160‑4 is a profile of ISO 19160‑1, i.e. it is a conceptual model for addresses used for postal addressing.

BS EN ISO 19160-2:2023

Addressing - Assigning and maintaining addresses for objects in the physical world

Current

Published:

30 Nov 2023