[talk-au] Question about importing Victoria street addresses

[Andrew Harvey]

On Thu, 13 May 2021, at 5:43 PM, Yuchen Pei wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I've been using OSM for a while now, but am new to contributing so 
> not familiar with how things are normally imported.
> 
> I notice that a lot of street addresses in Melbourne are missing 
> on OSM.
> 
> I also noticed that a permission / waiver of the address data has 
> already been obtained 
> (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:Vicmap_CCBYPermission_OSM_Final_Jan2018_Ltr.pdf). So 
> I wonder what is preventing the data from being imported? Thanks.

Hi Yuchen, good to see you're interested in potentially using Vicmap address data to improve OSM addresses. In the last two weeks or so I've been working on a code pipeline to process Vicmap data so see what could be done for a potential import. I just posted that to the list here, still a work in progress.

To do an import, apart from getting community buy in, we need to ensure we're not just dumping uncleaned or unsutiable data into OSM, and respecting existing mapped addresses. On the surface it looks easy, but it's quite a lot of work to get this right. I've started work to tackle some of these hurdles, so hopefully soon I can present a solid proposal to the community for an import.

> I've read that, and noticed a similar effort on a smaller scale 
> i.e. Melbourne City 
> (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Catalogue/data.melbourne.vic.gov.au-addresses). However 
> according to the Import Catalogue 
> (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Catalogue) it started 
> in 2016-12 and is still in the stage of "Planning".
> n
> Does anyone have some context on that project, e.g. what happened 
> to it?

>From looking at OSM around Melbourne, it doesn't look like that import has gone ahead so far.

On Sat, 15 May 2021, at 9:02 AM, Joseph Guillaume wrote:
> I'd be happy to help with the manual checking using JOSM if you/someone else does the approval.
> 
> In terms of data preparation, it looks like the data is already on https://batch.openaddresses.io/job/91961 and the process for conversion with oa2osm isn't too difficult (https://github.com/andrewharvey/au-actmapi-osm-import/blob/master/Makefile) though the code needs to be updated to only include housenumber and address, not city.

Hi Joseph,

I added the source to OpenAddresses and wrote oa2osm, but it's certainly not that simple. While OpenAddresses does process the source Vicmap data into something simplified and oa2osm does convert this into OSM's address tagging schema, it doesn't handle many of the complexities of the data and isn't suitable to be used for an import.

The Victorian OpenAddresses source and oa2osm is good where you have tools built to work with OSM data (eg. OSMAnd, Nominatim) but want to use the Vicmap data instead of OSM with those tools.

> My main concern would be to decide where addresses will be added. My preference is to place on buildings (https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-au/2021-April/014554.html), but there aren't many buildings in OSM yet, and I'm not keen on importing geometries even if they are available (e.g. https://batch.openaddresses.io/job/100514). We could focus on the few areas that have buildings and no addresses. Alternatively I'd be keen for the address placement strategy to be discussed on this list rather than simply using the coordinates in the import directly.

I would say this is a hot topic of discussion in OSM, and there are a few different opinions held by contributors.

I agree that we would need to discuss and have a consensus on where the address tags should go, for a potential import.