[talk-au] Victorian Vicmap Address Import Proposal

[cleary]

I think I recall discussion some months ago about incorrect suburbs being assigned addresses in Nominatim when relying on suburb boundaries. I think I recall that most errors occurred near the boundaries rather than the centre of areas, and more often when the suburb has an irregular shape (not many suburb areas are even close to rectangular in shape). Therefore I would support inclusion of the suburb/town/hamlet in  addresses to ensure accuracy.  

In regard to addr:suburb and addr:city,  I have always tried to match the address with the designation in OSM. So if an address is in a bounded area identified as "place=town" then I added addr:town=*  or for a hamlet it would be addr:hamlet=*  etc.   Localities are by definition, unpopulated places so it would be unusual to have addr:locality=  as almost all "localities" would be small places located within bounded areas such as hamlets, towns, etc.   Bounded areas that have no shops, schools, amenities (or almost none) would usually be place=hamlet  as they are identified bounded areas usually with a population. For the purposes of the import, it might be too diffiicult to separate OSM's various place classifications city/suburb/town/village/hamlet etc so I would support  addr:suburb=* as better than nothing.

I would also support adding postcodes.  I am more familiar with NSW than other states but there are three bounded areas in NSW named Kingswood differentiated only by their postcodes and local government areas. Similarly I know of two bounded areas in NSW named Long Plain. I think there are others but they don't come readily to mind. However I think it emphasises the usefulness of postcodes in addresses.




On Wed, 19 May 2021, at 2:48 PM, Andrew Harvey via Talk-au wrote:
> Some specific topics for discussion/feedback I have so far are:
> 
> 1. How should we handle existing address interpolation ways? Should 
> these be left as they are or replaced with individually mapped address 
> points? I'm proposing we replace.
> 
> 2. Should we also import `addr:suburb`, `addr:state` and 
> `addr:postcode` tags? I'm proposing we do.
> 
> Given postcode regions aren't mapped, then adding these to the address 
> should be very helpful.
> 
> `addr:state` is less important given these addresses fall within the 
> Victoria state admin boundary already. The wiki touches on this saying 
> "A few mappers consider higher-level tags, or even addr:city=* as 
> redundant, since they could be calculated from the respective boundary 
> relations they are contained in (if present and valid). However, such 
> practice has severe disadvantages and can lead to wrong results."
> 
> Either way, I don't think it matters too much, but since it's not 
> harmful to include, and might provide some benefit, then we may as well 
> include `addr:state`?
> 
> `addr:suburb` is similar to `addr:state`, suburb/locality boundaries 
> are already well mapped in Victoria. Since we have this detail from the 
> source data I think we probably should still include it.
> 
> 3. `addr:suburb` vs `addr:city`.
> 
> Both tags are in use within Australia. According to taginfo 
> (https://taginfo.geofabrik.de/australia-oceania/australia/search?q=addr%3A) within Australia addr:suburb occurs 521 ,671 times and addr:city 562,542 times.
> 
> The iD address preset fields uses addr:suburb.
> 
> Victoria only has a handful of place=city objects 
> (https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/17vc), Melbourne, Geelong, Ballarat, 
> Bendigo, Shepparton, Warrnambool, Traralgon, Bairnsdale, Wangaratta, 
> Wodonga, Horsham, Mildura.
> 
> Because for addressing, it's the suburb/locality that appears on the 
> address not the city (eg. Melbourne place/city covers the whole greater 
> melbourne urban area, but not all the addresses here include 
> "Melbourne", only those within the CBD area where the Melbourne 
> place=suburb exists.
> 
> While in rural areas it's a locality not a suburb, the two usually go 
> hand in hand, and I'd say it's okay to still tag these as addr:suburb 
> even though it's technically a locality and not a suburb.
> 
> In this way I'd argue that addr:city has no place in Australia 
> (convince me otherwise).
> 
> Maybe for this import, where we find an address existing in OSM and it 
> has addr:city which matches the addr:suburb from our Vicmap address, 
> then we automatically swap it to addr:suburb?
> 
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