Re: CHAT: postcodes

Irina Rempt writes:
 > On Saturday 21 September 2002 23:49, Christophe wrote:
 >
 > > > i've always thought it really wasteful that each
 > > > person has a street address, a phone number, and an
 > > > email address here. why not have something that could
 > > > be used for everything ?
 > >
 > > Maybe because then it would be impossible for people to have more
 > > than one phone, or more than one e-mail address?
 >
 > And people living in the same house couldn't each have their own e-mail
 > address. The five of us have at least a dozen e-mail addresses between
 > us. Also, there are entities without a street address (like the local
 > Council of Churches) that still need an e-mail address, and entities
 > with several street addresses (like a committee) that have only one
 > e-mail address.
 >

None of these represent an insurmountable barrier, in theory.  Give
every person and organization as many unique IDs as they want, and
store them in a registry.  Each ID crossrefers to a postal address, an
email address, and a telephone connection.  But only to one of each of
these (well, maybe more than one phone number, but only one in each
category, like "work" "home" and "mobile").  Now each person can have
multiple addresses, and each address can have multiple people, but
each ID refers to a particular person (or organization) at a
particular address.

This is, of course, only a theoretical proposal - there are obvious
problems with putting it into practice.