Implementation guidelines for compounds

Compound values are values which are represented by a characteristic set of related data elements, which all together make up one value. Such are postal addresses of houses, species names in biology, 3D-coordinates etc. From an ontological point of view, one value must be represented as one instance of a suitable class. Often however the compound contains hierarchical higher order information, like street, city, genus etc. As this is a frequent encoding problem, a guideline would be helpful.