[josm-dev] Czech house numbers

[Radomir Cernoch]

Hi,

the system is following: We have the standard 'housenumber', which
defines the order of houses on a street and therefore this number makes
sense only in combination with the street name. This system is used by
most people as it is easy to remember and hence this number is rendered
on OSM maps. In Czech this number is called "číslo orientační."

The second system, which we currently store in 'alternatenumber' ("číslo
popisné") defines a unique number of a house within a village/town or
suburb. Houses are ordered historically, the oldest has number 1, the
newest might have 4029. Therefore houses 4028 and 4029 can be on
opposite sides of the town. This system is used for administration and
in small villages it serves as the primary system, since it is not
crucial to adopt the 'housenumber' system if eg. the municipality
consists only of one street.

Lastly 'alternatenumber' is used on Czech land register maps and so we
need it for finding position of individual houses. This is why we would
appreciate if by looking at the map in JOSM, we could see both the
'alternatenumber' of a node together with the background register map
(provided by WMS).

I think we should currently resolve the following question:
Is it better to use 'addr:alternatenumber' (or any other similar key) as
the preferred way of storing secondary housing numbers for _most_
countries or is it better to adopt 'addr:some_czech_label' for Czech
Republic and 'addr:some_german_label' for Germany, etc.?

Personally I would set up 'addr:alternatenumber' wherever possible and
switch to 'addr:some_local_label' if local system was too different.
However this would probably require to push 'alternatenumber' into
official list of attributes...

Yours,
Radek Cernoch