[Data-modeling] isA Location vs hasA Location and addresses

[Tom Morris]

I know location has been discussed a number of times, but the current
schema still seems suboptimal.  This was really brought home the other
day when I was looking at the Miss Worcester Diner.  It's a Restaurant
which has the included type Business Location which has an address of
type Mailing Address.  It's housed in a Structure which also has an
address property.  The description of the Location type says that it
should be used for buildings, so it's co-typed with Location was well.

Which one of these do I look at to find the location of the
restaurant?  Which one(s) do I update?  If they get out of sync, which
do I believe?

Given the current emphasis on location based applications, I think
it's important to try and clean this up.  Some of the previous related
discussion threads include:

    Nov 2007 addressed location http://markmail.org/thread/6hhxgqpjxzqklmto
    Jun 2008 retail locations/business locations
http://markmail.org/thread/owrnug63l2snhqje
    May 2008 corporate headquarters location
http://markmail.org/thread/u54lwkska4qocui6

In the last thread, the discussion about addresses for corporate
headquarters, Danny suggested that a single property be used, but it
appears that while that single property is called mailing_address and
the description says it's a mailing address, the common usage is as a
street address.

I'd like to see street address and mailing address split since they
have different forms and different semantics.  I also think that the
street addresses should be split out into a separate type so that they
can be used as a cotype to eliminate the redundancy such as exists
currently between Structure and Business Location.  Similarly I think
it would be useful to strengthen the emphasis on the use of Location
as a co-type and minimize places in the schema where it is used as a
property instead.

What do others think?

Tom