Re: International Address Format Standard

Ron,

the Universal Postal Union [http://www.upu.int] keeps some record
about internationally used address formats. However, what they have is
also not a standard, but more of an inventory of national peculiarities
[http://www.upu.int/addressing/AN/AN.pdf]. In HL7, an international
health care standard, we have been struggling with a standard address
format for quite a while, and we now came up with an alternative
solution, which is more like a text-markup approach than a fixed
data structure. This works well for addresses and person names. You
can see our draft specification at [http://aurora.rg.iupui.edu/v3dt],
and specifically you can see an explanation and example of our
approach at [http://aurora.rg.iupui.edu/v3dt/report.html#PostalAddress]

Hope this might help. If you have comments or suggestions, please
contact me.

thanks,
-Gunther


Ron Peterson wrote:
>
> Is there any such thing as a standard schema for international
> addresses?  Maybe I'm grasping at straws, but one can always hope.  I
> can find information about individual countries easily enough.  But how
> about a general solution?  Or is this just pie in the sky?
>
> Ron Peterson
> rpeterson@yellowbank.com
>
> ************