Question: I am designing a contact management system and have come across an interesting issue regarding modeling geographic locations in a consistent way. I would like to be able to record locations associated with a particular person (mailing address(es) for work, school, home, etc.) My thought is to create a table of locales such as the following:

**Locales (ID, LocationName, ParentID)** where autonomous locations (such as countries, e.g. USA) are parents of themselves. This way I can have an arbitrarily deep nesting of 'political units' (COUNTRY > STATE > CITY or COUNTRY > STATE > CITY > UNIVERSITY). Some queries will necessarily involve recursion.

I would appreciate any other recommendations or perhaps advice regarding predictable issues that I am likely to encounter with such a scheme.

Answer: 
I would think carefully about this since it may not be a necessary feature. 
Why not just use a text field and let users type in an address?

Remember the [KISS principle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle) (Keep It Simple, Stupid).
I'm modeling an apps for global users and I have the same problems, but I think that this approach could already be in use in many enterprise. But why this problem don't have an universal solution? Or, has this problem one best solution that can be the start point or anybody in the world need think in a solution for it since beginnig?
In IT, we are making the same things any times and in many places, unfortunately. For exemplo, who are not have made more than one user, customer or product's database? And the worst, all enterprise in the world has made it. I think that could have universal solutions for universal problems.