EENA NG112 Civic Location Profiling Sub-Group
Description
Street addresses are critical information for administrative, emergency response, research, marketing, mapping, GIS, routing and navigation, and many other purposes. Because they have evolved over many decades, under the control of thousands of local jurisdictions, in many different record and database formats, and to serve many purposes, different address formats and types pose a number of complex geoprocessing and modeling issues.
By providing a single and flexible data structure for exchanging street address data, implementations of data exchanges are simplified, making them more reliable and less likely to need small changes, especially over time.
The "Presence Information Data Format Location Object" (PIDF-LO) (see RFC 4119) is an XML data format for carrying geographical information on the Internet. PIDF-LO can contain civic address information, and supports a range of so-called "civic address types" (CATypes) to hold individual attributes of such addresses (see Section 2.2.1 of RFC 4119 and Section 3.1 of RFC 5139).
In many use cases, PIDF-LOs are populated with data from long-established sources, like postal or governmental building registers, line information databases and yellow / white pages of infrastructure providers, or official residents registers. The structure and format of data from such sources is almost always different from PIDF-LO's CAtypes definition - additionally, structure and format of those sources differs from country to country.
To make use of such existing data sources, transposing that data into PIDF-LO format is required. With no guidelines available on how to map source Fields into CAtype elements, different creators of PIDF-LO documents might end up with different results, even when using the same data source - which reduces interoperability and increases the risk of misinterpretation by receivers.
Therefore, civic address considerations are necessary to ensure uniform usage of PIDF-LO elements for such data sources. http://tools.ietf.org/wg/geopriv/draft-ietf-geopriv-civic-address-recommendations/ provides recommendations on how to write such profiles and also contains a profile for addresses used in Austria. NENA is working on a profile for the US and Canada. The aim of this group is to create such civic address considerations for countries in Europe. As an initial starting point the work in the UK done by the NICC in cooperation with the Royal Mail will be utilized.
Milestones
Oct 2009 Information sharing about the need for civic location profiling.
Jan 2010 Civic Location Profile for the UK completed.
Jan 2010 Discussion about which countries to pick next.
