Существуют ли передовые практики (или даже стандарты) для последовательного и всестороннего хранения адресов в базе данных?

Чтобы быть более конкретным, на данном этапе я считаю, что есть два случая для хранения адресов:

you just need to associate an address to a person, a building or any item (the most common case). Then a flat table with text columns (address1, address2, zip, city) is probably enough. This is not the case I'm interested in. you want to run statistics on your addresses : how many items in a specific street, or city or... Then you want to avoid misspellings of any sorts, and ensure consistency. My question is about best practices in this specific case : what are the best ways to model a consistent address database ?

Проект / решение для конкретной страны было бы отличным началом.

ANSWER Похоже, идеального ответа на этот вопрос пока не существует, но:

xAL, as suggested by Hank, is the closest thing to a global standard that popped up. It seems to be quite an overkill though, and I am not sure many people would want to implement it in their database... To start one's own design (for a specific country), Dave's link to the Universal Postal Union (UPU) site is a very good starting point. As for France, there is a norm (non official, but de facto standard) for addresses, which bears the lovely name of AFNOR XP Z10-011 (french only), and has to be paid for. The UPU description for France is based on this norm. I happened to find the equivalent norm for Sweden : SS 613401. At European level, some effort has been made, resulting in the norm EN 14142-1. It is obtainable via CEN national members.