sure, but you still have problems, even with a well structured system. Postcodes and addresses are designed for delivering mail, but then society tries to shoeh

sure, but you still have problems, even with a well structured system. Postcodes and addresses are designed for delivering mail, but then society tries to shoehorn them into doing other things. As an example consider the query "show me all addresses in the database in Bavaria". It sounds very straight forward, but it isn't because postal address don't contain that info, you have to keep a mapping of postcodes to Länder or whatever other geo unit you want to use. Likewise there are all sorts of very well known places that have no correspondence to official postal directories, for example here in London if I ask someone to meet me in Chinatown they will know exactly where that is. But it doesn't exist as an "official" address. We (my company Nestoria - a real estate search engine in 8 markets) have to geocode tens of thousands of listings a day all with incomplete or haphazard address info. Here's a talk one of our guys gave a few months ago about how we do it. TL;DR - geocoding real world data is hard http://www.lokku.com/nestoria-geo-system/ http://www.lokku.com/nestoria-geo-system/ he's going to give a much more detailed talk at the next #geomob if anyone is in London and interested: http://geomobldn.org/post/47481139743/date-set-for-july-geomob http://geomobldn.org/post/47481139743/date-set-for-july-geom...