[Imports] Joining/merging address attributes to existing footprints

[joe at joelarson.com]

Steve, Josh and Thomas - sincere appreciation for your thoughts, 
comments, advice! I want to respond and fill-in any missing information 
from my original post.

The data is from mixed sources and methods; GPS field 
observation/survey and an analysis/workflow where select parcel 
attributes were centroided then edited, moved to be on top of the 
primary building on that parcel. Field validation has been conducted for 
points which were not originally collected from GPS field survey. This 
is a large effort of multiple agencies - where my office is the primary 
lead, managing the process. The data is public domain licensed.

My plan is to use already utilized methods to transfer attributes, such 
as a spatial join e.g. 
http://maps.cga.harvard.edu/qgis/wkshop/join_spatial.php - manual 
inspection is not my primary plan with this project. From my experience 
so far, I understand the discouragement of imports - I also recognize 
the high priority respect to pre-existing data holds and we will be very 
cautious of historic user contributions during this process.

Josh - thank you for reminding me about the Conflation plugin for JOSM. 
I've been down the whole OpenJump, RoadMatcher conflation effort when 
our County purchased contractor delivered street-centerlines (also 
public domain) - never followed through on that project/effort but I 
have great optimism about the JOSM Conflation effort. I will get 
accustomed to the plugin-workflow and give feedback, as well as follow 
your developments...are you funded or take donations at all for your 
work on this?

Thomas - I am still going through the documentation and doing tests 
with the ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap. The only tag that is in the 
existing building-footprints I'm attempting to conflate information/tags 
to is `building=yes`. Something I'm kinda stuck on is: how can I use the 
Attribute Selector to create stand-alone attributes for the tags I 
previously proposed such as addr:street:prefix or addr:housenumber:unit 
? (BTW, I noticed a typo in my original post where I wrote `UNIT -> 
addr:street:suffix` meant to say `UNIT -> addr:housenumber:unit` ... 
tags which I was looking to hear feedback on.) I may want to address 
this on http://esriosmeditor.codeplex.com/discussions however, instead 
of boring others with particulars...

Thank you again all _ joe