[Imports] Import of addresses in Poland

Adam Williamson adamw at happyassassin.net
Wed Feb 5 16:51:15 UTC 2014


On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 09:49 +0200, Jaak Laineste (Nutiteq) wrote:
> Here are some specific points I need to challenge
> 
> 
> >  If the main idea is to have OSM data reflect reality - a lack of imports (of course, well- made ​​) deviates from this idea.
> 
> No, this is not the main idea of OSM. More important than to reflect
> reality is to have living every day up-to-date map, created by
> community. Too much detailed data from imports works unfortunately
> against this. You will have data what the community cannot keep
> up-to-date, this will be more and more outdated, and after few years
> the data is so bad that noone can use it and it is not possible to
> update it.

I'm curious to know if street addresses do go stale, and if so
how fast, and how this differs between countries.

The system in most North American cities that I've seen is based around
blocks: NA cities tend to use grid systems, and devote a rather generous
range of addresses to a 'block', i.e. the stretch of a street between
two cross-streets. Here in Vancouver, each block gets a range of 100
numbers - if you live in the '2400 block of West 43rd', you live on the
stretch of West 43rd Avenue which has the range 2400-2499 assigned to it
- but there's rarely anywhere near 100 addresses on it. The numbers in
each block are spaced out quite widely to provide lots of slack space
for densification without renumbering being required (so you'll
typically see 2400, 2404, 2408 etc on one side and 2401, 2405, 2409 etc
on the other). I don't believe house numbers here tend to go stale
hardly at all - if you do an import and then never update it your data
will be *incomplete* in future, but likely not particularly inaccurate.

The other place I've lived is the UK, and there the system is obviously
massively more chaotic (since the street plans for most places were
arrived at entirely without planning, and the numbering systems
similarly...), but this is somewhat counterbalanced by a national
obsession with tradition - so even when they really *should* renumber
streets, they tend to just stick alphabetical suffixes and things on
instead. So again, if you know where a given house number is, that
information isn't likely to go stale very fast or at all.

The UK does have a penchant for renaming streets after particularly
successful footballers, though, I suppose.

I don't know anything about how this works outside the places I've
lived, though. Are there places where street addresses go stale faster?
Has this been considered in relation to the Polish import?
-- 
adamw

-- 
adamw




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