MeridianMERIDIAN

Street Name

geography.address.street_name

Name of the street (e.g., Main Street, Oxford Street). May include street type (Street, Avenue, Boulevard, etc.).

Casts to
VARCHAR
Scope
Locale-specific
Locales
EN, EN_AU, EN_GB, EN_CA, EN_US, DE, FR, ES, IT, NL, PL, RU, JA, ZH, KO, AR

Background

Origin

A street name is an identifying name given to a street or road.[1] The part of a street name that indicates the type of street, as in Main Road, Fleet Street or Park Avenue, is known as the generic.[1] A street called Park Avenue need not have the characteristics of an avenue in the generic sense.[1] Streets are normally named, and the properties on them numbered, by decision of the local authority.[1] In the past, many streets were named for the type of commerce or industry found there.[1]

In the United States, the Postal Service's Publication 28 divides the delivery address line into the primary address number, predirectional, street name, suffix, postdirectional, secondary address identifier and secondary address.[2] Publication 28's Appendix C1 gives AVE as the Postal Service standard suffix abbreviation for AVENUE.[3] Publication 28's Appendix C1 gives ST as the Postal Service standard suffix abbreviation for STREET.[3] The Federal Geographic Data Committee endorsed the United States Thoroughfare, Landmark, and Postal Address Data Standard in February 2011.[4] The FGDC address standard carries the document number FGDC-STD-016-2011.[4][5] The FGDC address standard was sponsored by the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA) and the National Emergency Number Association (NENA).[5] The FGDC address standard was written to provide a systematic, consistent basis for recording all addresses in the United States.[4]

Use

The FGDC address standard notes that USPS abbreviations for street name directionals and types are widely used.[5] The FGDC address standard gives N W Jones Tr as an example of an ambiguous abbreviation, in which Tr could stand for Terrace, Trail or Trace.[5] Publication 28 says hyphens in a street name normally are not significant and may be replaced with a space.[6]

The OpenStreetMap wiki advises that abbreviations in addr:street should generally be spelled out in full.[7] The OpenStreetMap wiki says the addr:street name should match that of a nearby road, track or path.[7] Libpostal's documentation shows the address Marktstraße 14 expanding to markt strasse 14.[8] Streets in Brussels often have a Dutch name and a French name.[1]

Expect one street to arrive in several spellings in the same file, such as Fifth Avenue, Fifth Ave and 5th Ave, and normalise them to one form before you join or deduplicate on the column. (Meridian's view) Keep the original value next to any normalised form, so that an expansion you got wrong can be undone. (Meridian's view) Do not assume the street type is the last word, or that it is a separate word at all; look at names from each country in the file before you split a type off. (Meridian's view) Treat a street name as text to match rather than as an identifier, and join on it only together with the place or postcode. (Meridian's view)

Where you'll meet it

The US Census Bureau's TIGER/Line Feature Names relationship files carry the base name portion of each standardised feature name in a NAME field.[9] The TIGER/Line Feature Names files also carry a FULLNAME field that joins the expanded prefix, base name and suffix components with a space between each.[9]

Where a road in OS Open Roads has a name in more than one language, the name1 attribute holds the Welsh or Gaelic version.[10] Where a road in OS Open Roads has a name in more than one language, the name2 attribute holds the English version.[10]

Sources

  1. [1]Street namesecondary source
  2. [2]23 Delivery Address Line | Postal Explorerdocumentation
  3. [3]C1 Street Suffix Abbreviations | Postal Explorerdocumentation
  4. [4]United States Thoroughfare, Landmark, and Postal Address Data Standard — Federal Geographic Data Committeecatalogue entry
  5. [5]United States Thoroughfare, Landmark, and Postal Address Data Standardstandard
  6. [6]232 Street Name | Postal Explorerdocumentation
  7. [7]Key:addr:streetdocumentation
  8. [8]GitHub - openvenues/libpostal: A C library for parsing/normalizing street addresses around the world. Powered by statistical NLP and open geo data.documentation
  9. [9]TIGER/Line Shapefiles 2023 Technical Documentationorganisation
  10. [10]RoadLinkorganisation

Detection notes

v1 migration: Was address.street_name. Locale-specific. May or may not include street type suffix (St, Ave, Blvd, etc.).

Use it

CLI · DuckDB
$ finetype infer -i "Main Street" --mode column
→ geography.address.street_name

SELECT ft_infer('Main Street');
-- → 'geography.address.street_name'
Cast expression
CAST({col} AS VARCHAR)

Schema

https://meridian.online/schemas/geography.address.street_name · Frictionless type string

finetype taxonomy geography.address.street_name -o json-schema

Aliases

road

Type Registry