ISO Standard Street Addresses?

Question

Is there an ISO standard address format? I can't seem to find one, and I'd like to know for object- and database-design purposes.

(One interesting document that shows a bunch of formats is this: http://www.bitboost.com/ref/international-address-formats.html, but it's insane!)

Answer 1

No; each country defines its own standard.

There have been a number of questions about this in times past, including:

• Best practices for storing postal addresses in an RDBMS
• Is there a common street address database design for all addresses of the world

The second of those itself has references to a number of other SO questions.

You might want to check out the grandiosely named Universal Postal Union and its standards.

Answer 2

There are none. However, you can also consider that place is usually contained in a bigger place.

So, you can also use the hierarchical structure of places in following an address format. Which also means it differs from country-to-country.

You can read stuffs about this on:

• Universal Postal Union's paper Addressing the world, an address for everyone
• Place ontology from schema.org
• PostalAddress ontology from schema.org.