[OSM-newbies] Gaping hole in the Pittsburgh Metro Area

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Sun, Jul 14, 2013 at 8:11 AM, John Lewis <oflameo2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Have a BU-353 GPS dongle and an AO755 netbook
>  a mid tier desktop and a car to work with. How do I add all the house
> numbers and business names in my neighborhood to Open Street Map?

There are three ways to add addresses to OSM (and one other method
I'll mention later in this email).

The first, and easiest is to add POIs (Points of Interest) and make
sure they include address fields. If you're using iD or Potlach as
your OSM editor, there will be presets for address data.

If you're using Josm, you will have to fill in the fields.

The fields you are going to care about are documented here:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Address

The second way to add addresses is to manually add addresses to each
and every house on a block. This is fine if you have a ton of time and
energy, but very few of even the most dedicated mappers do this.

To do this, you'd either make a node for each object, and then add the
address tags on it, or you'd add them to the building. But with a
city, this will take a very long time.

The third way is to use what's called Address Interpolation, which is
documented on that page I sent you.

If you add interpolation alongside adding POIs yourself, then the
results will be pretty good (not perfect, but pretty good).

If you own a smartphone, such as an android phone, you can use a tool
like Keypad-Mapper, which is a tool optimized to add address points.


For navigation, I suggest OsmAnd, another Android tool.

Now, I mentioned a fourth way. If you are lucky enough to live in a
very small number of US cities which have had their addresses imported
from a government dataset, you may be in luck, but the number of
cities where this has happened is very, very small. And that's due to
a number of factors, including and especially the issues around data
licensing.

There are folks (myself being one of them) who are working to change
this, but it would be better not to wait, and to start collecting POIs
now, not just for the purposes of addressing, but for completeness of
the map in general.


My suggestion to you is to just map the things you care about, make
sure that your favorite places are on the map, and make sure that when
they are on the map, that they're mapped as completely as possible,
including with address tags.

- Serge