PISCES, the e-commerce Standards organisation,  has started work on
improving the many different ways our office and home addresses are used
and maintained.

Roger de Boehmler, Director General of PISCES, explains
‘Correct and consistent addressing is vital to all businesses. Different public
and private organisations use address information for different purposes –
and this has given rise to a complex variety of address formats and systems.

Updating and sharing address data has become very difficult and yet every
business relies on address information in some way. Indeed, the majority of
systems do not ‘talk to one another’. This is unwieldy, slow, expensive and
inconsistent. It is simply unacceptable in today’s connected world.’

The PISCES Workgroup will solve this problem by developing a single
electronic data Standard that can manage the multiple address formats.

The new Addressing Workgroup will define a means of interpreting addressing
formats and publish an agreed schema. This will lead to the rapid, accurate
and seamless exchange of addressing data. Like all PISCES Standards, the
Addressing Standard will be published for free download.
 
More here