[OSM-dev] Nominatim geocoding for Japanese address

[Sarah Hoffmann]

Hi,

On Wed, Apr 09, 2014 at 12:52:49AM +0900, Satoshi IIDA wrote:
> > Japanese address system
> I made Japanese address structure for OSM, last year.
> And got consensus between Japanese mappers. also reported in Tagging ML.
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2013-September/014816.html

I rememeber this mail but obviously misunderstood that it is an
finished proposal. I also cannot find much data that follows the schema.
Taginfo reports that there are more addr:block_number than addr:blocknumber
but that might be unrelated.

> Documentation is written in Japanese, but certainly need more easy
> description.
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/JA:Key:addr#.E6.97.A5.E6.9C.AC.E3.81.AE.E4.BD.8F.E6.89.80.E8.A1.A8.E8.A8.98.E3.81.AB.E3.81.A4.E3.81.84.E3.81.A6
> 
> Block structure detail (too complex, sorry)
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/JA:Addresses

It's easy enough to understand but it would be really helpful if
you could translate the page to English. I fear that the translation
with Google is not accurate enough.

> Problem is the absence of address data on Japanese area.
> As my early mail, most of admin boundary relation is broken.

Indeed, that makes it more difficult bu I believe that many
place nodes are already there and they are good enough to start with.

> But if we could do so detailed search on OSM, I'm very happy to encourage
> to collect address data on Japan :)

I don't think it will be difficult to implement this schema in Nominatim.
I would kindly suggest that you translate the wiki page, then, if you
have not done that yet, enter the data for one or two of these lower 
neighbourhoods into OSM and then again send a mail to tagging@ for 
discussion (and maybe open a trac ticket for Nominatim at the same
time, I do notmally not follow tagging@). There are some details which
are not clear but it is probably easier to discuss on a concrete example.
Also, there are other parts in the world that use block-based addressing
and it would be great if the tagging can be used there as well.

Sarah