UNE-EN ISO 19160-4:2017

This part of ISO 19160 defines key terms for postal addressing, postal address components and constraints on their use.

Specifically, this part of ISO 19160 defines postal address components organized into three hierarchical levels:

elements, such as organization name or postcode, which have well-defined conceptual meaning and are not themselves made up of subordinate components, though they may be sub-divided for technical purpose;

constructs, such as organization identification, which group elements into units form a logical portion of a postal address;

segments, such as addressee specification, which group related postal address constructs and/or postal address elements into units with a specific defined function.

This part of ISO 19160 also defines a mechanism for creation of sub-elements, which correspond to either sub-divisions of element content, such as door type or door indicator, or to multiple occurrences and locations of elements in an address, such as levels of administrative regions.

This part of ISO 19160 does not specify the length or value range of components.

Moreover, this part of ISO 19160 defines the codes to identify elements and sub-elements.

Further this part of ISO 19160 specifies postal address rendering rules. This includes identification and ordering of output lines in a rendered address, conditions for selection of candidate lines, the order and concatenation of postal address components, required and optional components, parameters to contextualize address for rendering, and the formatting of the components, subject to constraints on the space available for that task. Postal address rendering rules are represented in this part of ISO 19160 as a postal address template.

Finally this part of ISO 19160 defines language suitable for computer processing to formally express postal address templates.