Civic Address Considerations
PIDF-LO is the IETF's format for location information. It can hold civic and geodetic location information. While it is possible to express coordinates worldwide in a unique format, the format of civic address may differ from country to country. For example, some countries have "Sub-Branch Road Names", others not. The PIDF-LO definition knows a basic set of civic address types (CATypes) which can be expressed in PIDF-LO's XML elements. However, the IETF does not say how these XML elements should be used in individual countries to hold the civic address information since the IETF cannot create country-specific variations of their protocols.
For example, in Austria house numbers can be quite complex, e.g. "1a-5a Block 1b Haus 2c Stiege 1" could be the house number part of a civic address. The IETF currently just has two elements related to house numbers. Hence, there has to be a mapping definition, where to put all the Austrian house number parts in a PIDF-LO document to ensure that the receiver (for emergency calls the PSAP) is able to correctly interpret the address.
These mappings of civic address fields to PIDF-LO elements should be described in documents called "Civic Address Considerations".
A guideline for writing such documents is available at: Civic Address Recommendations and an IANA registry pointing to these documents will be available soon.
Example: Civic Address Considerations Registration for the Austrian building and habitation registry
NG112 Civic Location Profiling Sub-Group
Links:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-geopriv-civic-address-recommendations
