Working as a Senior Information Architect with the Office of the Chief Information Officer for the Province of British Columbia I developed enterprise data standards for Mailing, Delivery and Residential Addresses.
From a data modelling perspective addresses are a challenging entity – they are fundamental to many business activities, yet most systems capture them in a different format, making it difficult to exchange records. A given address can be broken down into many separate data elements, and there are many different types of addresses – each of which has it’s own structure and composition.
In Canada addresses can be in English or French. Address Data Standards: Mailing, Delivery and Residential were completed as a part of the Province of British Columbia’s Identity Information Management (IDIM) program. The project was a significant update to existing work produced in 2000, and now provides a solid Enterprise Information Architecture foundation for addresses across the organization by specifying the semantics, syntax and lexicon of address information for the organization.
The published standards can be downloaded from the Office of the Chief Information Officer of the Province of British Columbia.