[Talk-GB] addr:place cleanup process

[Rob Nickerson]

Hi all,

As we learnt the other week, the addr:place tag has often been incorrectly
used here in the UK. The tag addr:place is meant to be used when the
address does *not* reference a street (tagged with addr:street) at all.
This is frequently seen in small villages in continental Europe which often
don't have any street names at all.

In the UK most cases of addr:place and addr:street being used together are
incorrect and are cases where addr:suburb should have been used instead of
addr:place. You can browse the Nominatim QA
<https://nominatim.org/qa/#map=8.06/53.26/-0.64&layer=addr_place_and_street>
to find examples and help clean these up.

To help with this clean up effort I have tested an approach in JOSM that
some might consider as captured by the Automated Edits code of conduct. I
therefore wanted to share this process before proceeding.

Step 1:
Identify a potentially incorrect use of the addr:place tag. To do this I am
looking at the list of values used on TagInfo GB and checking if any of
these are villages/towns. If they are then there is a high chance that the
addr:place tag is incorrect.
https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org.uk/keys/addr%3Aplace#values

Step 2:
Open the data in JOSM using an overpass query. An example query I am using
to download the data is:

[out:xml][timeout:90];
{{geocodeArea:England}}->.searchArea;
(
  nwr["addr:place"="Eccleston"](area.searchArea);
);
(._;>;);
out meta;

Step 3:
Inspect the data in JOSM paying particular attention to other addr:* tags.
To do this I start by doing a Ctrl+F and search for e.g.
"addr:place"="Eccleston". This selects all the features with this tag. I
can then see the full range of addr:* tags used on these features. High use
of addr:street reiterates the incorrect use of addr:place. I can also see
if the addr:suburb tag has been used on any features -> if it has then I go
investigate this separately. I also investigate uses of all other addr tags
except housenumber/name, unit, flats and street.

Step 4
Change addr:place to add:suburb. I get to this stage quicker if step 3 does
not identify any conflicting addr:* tags (e.g. if the only other addr tags
are housenumber/name and street). The more addr:* tags there are the more I
look into individual OSM features before making this change.

As always, if in doubt then I don't proceed.

How do you feel about this sort of approach? With proper time spent
carefully looking at the other addr tags that have been used, then I
believe it is a low risk edit.

P.S. Feel free to check out the results of a couple trials I made. e.g.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/116122672#map=14/53.6500/-2.7281
I'll pause on making more as I realise I should get the discussion going
first.

Thank you,
*Rob*
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