[Talk-GB] Street-name toids

Mark Goodge mark at good-stuff.co.uk
Thu Aug 13 12:34:25 UTC 2020



On 13/08/2020 11:25, Robert Whittaker (OSM lists) wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Aug 2020 at 16:56, SK53 <sk53.osm at gmail.com> wrote:
>> OpenRoads from the Ordnance Survey contains a field containing the toid for the street name. I wonder if we should include these alongside usrn & uprn. They may be more useful than either for gathering complex roads which share a name.
> 
> I'd tend to see the TOIDs are just an internal ID used in OS MasterMap
> and not something that there's much value in adding to OSM. I'd have
> thought that that USRN should be a sufficient unique reference number
> for highways. (Everything in OS MasterMap has a TOID, and actually I
> think streets have two -- one for the centreline geometry, and one for
> the bounding polygon. If we start adding TOIDs for streets, where
> would we stop?)

A street will have multiple TOIDs if it has multiple names. For example, 
USRN 200001, part of the A27 Shoreham By-Pass, is linked to TOIDs 
osgb4000000023625257 and osgb4000000030480763 - the first for the 
number,m the second for the name.

> However, from a practical point of view, if you want to check OSM for
> completeness against OS Open Roads, then having the TOID in OSM would
> be useful. But perhaps a better solution would be to persuade OS that
> they should be including the USRNs in OS Open Roads -- as these are
> now the promoted 'gold standard' open unique identifiers for streets.

There's an Open Data Linked Identifiers (LIDS) dataset available from OS 
which links USRNs to TOIDs.

https://osdatahub.os.uk/downloads/open/LIDS

Well, actually, there's two of them, and I'm not entirely sure what the 
difference is:

Road TOID Street USRN 10
RoadLink TOID Street USRN 8

Both of them have exactly the same data format.

The TOIDs in those datasets can then be cross-referenced against OS 
OpenNames to give the OS name for the linked USRNs. Although this isn't, 
always, the same as the official USRN name of the street, which can be 
confusing. But that's because OS (like OSM) maps what is visible, rather 
than necessarily what is documented, and if a street has a name by which 
it is commonly referred to then that's what goes on the OS maps even if 
it has a different name in the USRN.

Mark



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