>>Here we go again! It's not even funny...
>>
>>I guess you never created any Address Standardization applications...
>
>Now that is a different matter - but you didn't put it that way. You mentioned just different transcriptions of toponyms in a forum. Forum being mostly unformal, it's a non-problem. You don't select your city when you create your account - you enter it. This entry is not validated, so you not only have multiple spellings of the same place, you have typos as well. But this is a forum, not an application which needs standardized addresses.
>
Actually, I believe (not 100% sure) that some validation is happening behind the scenes. E.g. if you entered a city which is in the mapping table, it would automatically be converted to the correct entry. Say, we have several mappings for Moscow and for New York, so if you enter your city as NY it would be automatically converted to New York. But of course, this table just has few entries, so there is a plenty opportunity for bad data. Anyway, it's impossible to have clean database.

>So, within an international forum, I think you'll keep seeing Munich along with München and Muenchen, Moskva with Moscow and Moscou etc etc, and nobody will worry much about it. I know I won't.
>
>Now if you're to write an app with multiple address formats, you'd have to go Unicode, or keep multiple versions of the same addresses, or go for any other solution that would suit the requirements - but then, we don't know the requirements yet (i.e. I've only read first four messages from the thread), so... there's nothing we can say at this point.

I wrote an Address Standardization application for my former job at The Warren Group. We had several lookup tables and Streets table, which I believe we downloaded from Melissa...