[Talk-ca] Proposed import: Service New Brunswick address data

[webmaster at the506.com]

Hello...long time reader, first time poster. You may know me as the one 
who did (sometimes botched) the bulk of Canvec imports in New Brunswick. 
That job was completed last week.

As you may be aware, Canvec does not include road name or addressing 
data in New Brunswick. I have generally been using a combination of the 
StatsCan and Service New Brunswick databases to add road names by hand. 
It was a long and arduous process that took over a year, but it's 
finished.

Service New Brunswick maintains a publicly-available geocoded database 
of civic address points in the province 
(http://www.snb.ca/gdam-igec/e/2900e_1f_i.asp), and their license 
(http://www.snb.ca/gdam-igec/e/2900e_1e_v.asp) is compatible with OSM. 
My experience is that the database is very accurate in urban areas, but 
there are still a lot of gaps in rural areas. Any records that do not 
currently have a civic number attached will not be imported, and 
duplicate addresses will be ignored.

There are currently very few addresses in NB in the OSM database. They 
are mostly in downtown Fredericton and uptown Saint John, and those 
areas will be checked by hand to avoid duplicates. In the rest of the 
province, an attempt will be made to merge the data with existing ways 
whenever possible.

Each point would have the following tags:
addr:housenumber=
addr:street=
addr:city=
addr:province=NB
addr:country=CA
addr:source=SNB
addr:SNBid=unique ID from the SNB database

The plan is to break up the import by county, with the smaller less 
populous counties done first to work out the kinks and check for 
integrity with existing OSM data. Imports would be made from the 
506imports account.

Any comments?
J.P. Kirby (the506)