[Talk-GB] Beta release: Address mapping tool

Sat Feb 12 10:31:07 UTC 2022

Hi Rob, Russ and Pieter

Well done for getting this far. I can see a lot work has gone into this
tool. Here's a few initial observations and suggestions from me.

Bugs:
The check against existing addresses seems to be failing in an inconsistent
way... On both Firefox for Android and Windows, if I zoom in and pan around
(not very far) I end up with the OSM address point and the importable point
for some locations persisting. The order seems arbitrary - if the OSM
address point could be forced to be on top it would be less problematic. If
I reload the importable points disappear. I can pan further and find points
that still disappear, so it doesn't seem to have completely frozen. I've
put some screenshots here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1w5M3sq2LvqgNgCADKo_j0dQdJBqYmb0Y?usp=sharing

In a few cases with addresses around Pierremont Crescent
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/62267637 it wasn't listed as one of the
streets to use even though it is the closest highway, yet in others for the
same way it was listed (screenshot in the same folder as above).

Workflow improvements:
When you import an address point, it should immediately launch the "Review
and update the address" dialogue. With the current process it is a bit
confusing as you say you're going to add an address but then you don't type
anything in. You're left with a very similar icon to the one you originally
clicked to click again to add the details. Some people may think they've
done it automagically by finishing the "add address" process.

Leaving aside as much as possible the question of which tags such data
might be stored in, there seems to be some confusion in the dialogues when
there is a substreet, parent street address. The dialogue asks me what the
street is and gives me a list of nearby streets or I can type one. Below
that, place is an option but it's not obvious. I expect there will be
inconsistency in how this is used but from the variable names presented it
doesn't seem like the tool will move them. If I enter a street (which would
make sense where the 'substreet' is a street) the parentstreet placeholder
isn't presented to me in the editable list below.
Suggested approach:
Ask "what is the street/place name for this address" (or better, substitute
house name/number for "this address" like StreetComplete). Include in the
list of options nearby named landuses.
- If the answer is selected as a street (or what is typed matches a nearby
street name) treat it as a street.
- If the answer is typed or a landuse is selected and the name does not
match a nearby street treat it as a place / substreet and ask what /
whether there is a parent street.
Only have one placeholder for street / place / substreet and work out where
it should be stored transparently as above.
Leave parent street as an available placeholder in the dialogue below
regardless of what was selected. (If you then want to move what is in an
addr:street or addr:place tag into an addr:substreet tag if this is used
then this would be simple).

As an aside, the tool currently treats an addr:street & addr:parentstreet
combination as correct but asks you to add a street to an address with any
of addr:substreet, addr:place or addr:terrace with addr:parentstreet.
StreetComplete asks you to add a street to a building with addr:substreet
or addr:terrace but not addr:place.

Auto-capitalise: I think the tool should automatically change the case to
standard Capitalise Each Word format - is there any situation this would be
inappropriate?

Hope that helps

Tom

On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 at 22:42, Rob Nickerson <rob.j.nickerson at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> As previously discussed OSM UK has been working on a new way of mapping
> addresses. We're at a stage where we are ready to share this and ask for
> feedback. My thanks to Russ and Pieter for the development work and the
> many people who have provided support and advice since we came up with this
> idea 12 months ago.
>
> First a recap: The new tool makes use of openly licensed datasets in order
> to predict where an addressable point is. To do this we take OS generalised
> buildings and land ownership (Cadastral) parcels. The land parcels are used
> to split the generalised buildings (e.g split semi-detached houses into
> their two parts) and the centre of these split buildings become our
> predicted locations for addresses. These are then compared to the existing
> data in OpenStreetMap. We check for cases where the point falls within a
> building way in OSM, and when OSM already has an address within the
> Cadastral parcel. All of this is then presented in the user interface (we
> are using MapComplete as it works across desktop and mobile). Contributors
> can then add the address following a ground survey.
>
> With that in mind here is the link to the demo tool (in test mode so no
> data is written to OSM):
>
> https://pietervdvn.github.io/mc/develop/uk_addresses.html?test=true&z=7&lat=52.92215&lon=-1.87866&filter-to_handle=true&language=en&welcome-control-toggle=true#welcome
>
> A few initial observations:
>
>    1. As it is in test mode, you see some developer debug (e.g. the code
>    names for each block in the questions popup). Please ignore this as it
>    won't appear in the final version.
>    2. It can get slow if it tries to load too much data. If this is the
>    case I find refreshing the page at a fully zoomed in position works well.
>    3. Currently when you try to import a point you get the option to move
>    the location. As the data is coming from OS and the cadastral parcels this
>    doesn't make sense. I'm hoping we can get rid of the screen that allows you
>    to move the point.
>    4. A ref:GB:uprn tag is added if only one UPRN is found within a
>    cadastral parcel.
>    5. A uprn_count tag is also added. I personally find this useful as it
>    is a good indicator of how many addresses a point covers, therefore giving
>    a good piece of info to support QA checks. It also can help interpret if
>    something like house number "1-6" is six addresses or three (if just odd or
>    even numbers). Keen to get feedback on this proposed tag.
>    6. There may be some points proposed that are not actually addressable
>    locations. Currently you should just ignore these but another option is
>    that we have a button to say "Not an address". We could then ask what it is
>    and add a noaddress=yes and fixme= tag to OSM. Again feedback on this idea
>    is welcomed.
>    7. Due to the approach we selected, it does not always offer an
>    address point. This is particularly true in city centres and areas with
>    social housing. It comes from the lack of Cadastral parcels. We previously
>    discounted the raw UPRN data as our source of address locations (due to too
>    much noise) so there is not much we can do about this. You can pre-add a
>    partial addr:* point to OSM (e.g. addr:street) in another map editor and
>    then add the rest of the address using this tool.
>    8. It is not yet possible to add a completely new point that is not in
>    the pre-processed data. I am curious as to whether this functionality
>    should be added or not given that the aim is to share this tool with people
>    completely new to OSM.
>
>
> Finally, for those of a more technical nature, the datasets I described in
> the recap section are available as tiled GeoJSONs and MVT tiles. You can
> then use these in other places should you wish. For example the MVT can be
> added to JOSM (Imagery -> Imagery Preferences... -> Click "+MVT" button ->
> paste in https://osm-uk-addresses.russss.dev/addresses/{z}/{x}/{y}.mvt
> and add a maxzoom=21). Being a MVT layer, you can right click the layer
> name in the Layers side-panel and click "Convert to OSM data" to access it.
> Don't upload the whole thing; instead carefully pick features that you want
> to use for a ground survey / manual inspection.
>
> I look forward to hearing your feedback on this. The aim is to then get
> this in the hands of people completely new to mapping so that we can speed
> up the address mapping task.
>
> Thank you
> *Rob*
> _______________________________________________
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>
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