OPDA Knowledge base
Concept tier property

Address

opda:Address

Address

An Address is a socially-recognised locator for a Property, constructed by an issuing authority — Royal Mail (postal), OS AddressBase (UPRN), HMLR (title address), or INSPIRE (geospatial). The Address persists as a record-entity in that authority’s stewardship.

Why it matters

Most property data feeds carry several Addresses for the same Property: the marketing address used by the estate agent, the title address recorded by HMLR, the INSPIRE polygon centroid used by mapping consumers. These are not interchangeable — they are different records issued by different authorities and they evolve on different lifecycles. OPDA treats each as a first-class Address record, tagged by addressVariant (title / marketing / inspire), so downstream consumers can pick the authority they need.

If you are a data engineer who has spent time reconciling “the same address in five formats”, this is the entity that makes the variation explicit rather than hiding it.

Hard cases

  • Cosmetic re-format. Royal Mail re-formats a postcode or normalises a road name. The Address identity persists — same authority, same lifecycle, same record-entity.
  • Authority-internal succession. OS AddressBase retires a UPRN and re-issues it. The IC follows the authority’s own succession chain — the new UPRN-bearing Address is a successor of the old, not a fresh unrelated Address.
  • Cross-variant identity-claim. A marketing Address and a title Address that point to the same Property are not the same Address — they are two records, in two authority lifecycles, that happen to identify the same Property. The model never collapses them.
  • Property-side change. The Property changes (subdivision, merger) but the Address lifecycle is on the authority side. An Address can outlive its Property; a Property can lose its Address. The two evolve independently.
  • INSPIRE-only locatedness. A Property visible only through INSPIRE geospatial extent, with no postal or title address. The IC accommodates an Address that exists only in one authority’s lifecycle.

Identity Criterion

Two Address records refer to the same Address only if they share the same authority + record-id pair and are coherent under that authority’s stewardship lifecycle. An Address is not identified by its string form — two cosmetically-different renderings of the same Royal Mail record are the same Address; two cosmetically-identical strings issued by different authorities are different Addresses. See the Logical tier → for the typed structure.

  • Property — a Property may have multiple Address records (one per variant)
  • Registered Title — the title Address variant is the one HMLR records
%%{init: {"theme": "base"}}%% flowchart LR accTitle: Address related-Kinds neighbourhood graph accDescr: Address as one of multiple authority-issued locators for one Property; title variant cited by Registered Title; UPRN Succession Event affects the OS AddressBase variant. classDef centre fill:#E1BEE7,stroke:#6A1B9A,stroke-width:3px,color:#4A148C classDef cls fill:#B3E5FC,stroke:#0277BD,stroke-width:2px,color:#01579B Address["Address
(per variant)"]:::centre Property["Property"]:::cls Title["RegisteredTitle"]:::cls UPRNSucc["UPRNSuccessionEvent"]:::cls Property -->|"hasAddress (1..*)"| Address Title -->|"titleAddress variant"| Address UPRNSucc -->|"accompanies OS variant"| Address

Source ODR

ODR-0015 — Address and geography §2a

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