An addressing model for three-dimensional city properties in Hong Kong

A good address system has always been important for the systematic recording of personal or company information and for the effective delivery of products. In a society that demands rapid exchanges of information, an address serves also as a key to associate various governmental records, to link data of varying levels of summary, and to assist in strategic planning. In a city with complex building structures and street networks such as Hong Kong, a number of problems are encountered with addresses. These include the existing diverse address systems retained in a number of governmental units; the bilingual nature of the address system caused by a legacy of Hong Kong's past as a British colony populated largely by the Chinese; the three-dimensional variation of defining spatial units; and the lack of a clear postal code system all have led to difficulties in establishing a unified address system for the exchange of information. In this paper, the authors will try to examine all of these complexities in terms of the historical development of the address system and the physical setting of the city, followed by a proposal for a compartmentalized addressing model to cater to all existing variations. The model is to be implemented in a relational database with semantic data structures to facilitate multi-criteria searching and analysis.