Proposed criteria for the evaluation of an address assignment scheme in Botswana

An address assignment scheme identifies the components that make up an address and describes how values are assigned to these components. Address assignment schemes vary from country to country and there is often a strong cultural, religious and traditional connotation to them. We describe the current situation of addressing in Botswana, which is currently drafting a proposal for an address assignment scheme for location and postal addresses as part of the ‘Addressing Botswana ’ project. The Universal Postal Union (UPU) has an initiative, ‘Addressing the world – An address for everyone’, which aims to raise awareness on the importance of addresses as an essential part of the socio-economic infrastructure of its member countries. Within ISO/TC 211, Geographic information/Geomatics, the ISO 19160, Addressing, project is developing recommendations for the development of international standards to facilitate address interoperability. Drawing on these initiatives, we initiated a research project that aims to support the Addressing Botswana project. Focusing on the address interoperability of the ISO 19160 project, we firstly look at address assignment scheme. Based on this, a unique address assignment scheme for Botswana will be proposed. In this paper we propose criteria for an address assignment scheme in Botswana: a single set of place or area names; different addresses types for urban, rural and farm areas; principles for address numbering assignment; integration of different referencing systems; and a single authoritative master database of addresses. 1