[Talk-us-massachusetts] MA Address Points

[Greg Troxel]

"Alan & Ruth Bragg" <alan.ruth.bragg at gmail.com> writes:

> I thought that adding addresses to buildings would be easy. However, each
> address point contains the following 3 location fields.

Imports are hard!  That's why we are supposed to have a wiki page that
describes all of these details and a public review on talk-us@ and
imports@ before actualling importing anything.

First, we have to realize that there are two separate things people talk
about with addresses:

  - names of administrative divisions (usually this is the main thing)

  - the "settlement hierarchy", which is a bunch of names for populated
    places, often lining up with admin names, and these places are often
    sort of points and don't have boundaries.  For example "Tracey's
    Corner" is such a name.

  - finally, there's a nit about "postal addresses", but I think we're
    mostly not concerned with that except encoding the zip code.

I will limit discussion to massachusetts reality.  And note that I may
be off a bit on details.

> There are 15 "GEOGRAPHIC" names: Barnstable, Bourne, Brewster, Chatham,
> Dennis, Eastham, Falmouth, Harwich, Mashpee, Orleans, Provincetown,
> Sandwich, Wellfleet, Truro & Yarmouth. I assume we will use these as
> addr:city

Well, that's complicated!  Things are mostly sane except for Barnstable
and its parts.  The rest, yes those are cities (well towns), and those
names match the admin boundary level 8 name.  Which is another QA check
we will need to document and perform as part of the script that
processes the data to prepare changesets.

As I understand it, most of those places are actually the name of a
town/city (same thing, different government).

However, there is a town "Barnstable", which has a bunch of sub-places
in it, including "Hyannis" that everybody thinks is a town but actually
isn't.  And one of those sub-places is called Barnstable!  I am not
really sure how 911, the post office, registry of deeds, etc. detals
with barnstable.

I think Barnstable is a level-8 entity that has a single town
government, and thus the places like hyannis and yarmouth are level 9.
Is that so?

> There are 24 "COMMUNITY_" names, all of the above plus Centerville, Cotuit,
> Dennisport, Marston Mills, Mashpee, Oysterville, South Dennis, West
> Barnstable & West Dennis  These are all parts of cities. Should they be
> addr:suburb

I'm not really sure.  suburb is a messy concept, and there is also
neighborhood and quarter.

Consider places far from Barnstable where we don't have these sub-towns,
like Concord.  There is "West Concord", which is some kind of named
place (the downtown), but I am not aware of any exact boundary, and I
don't think it shows up in addresses.

I think COMMUNITY_NAME and PC_NAME should just be ignored.   We can
later modify addresses by adding them if we figure out a clear rationale
for why it's right.

OSM and the state have different data models, and there's no reason to
think that we should represent everything.

The hard thing is to figure out what knowledgeable people in those
communities, including fire/police/assessor, think the actual address
is, separate from what neighbordhood the address is in.

I suspect that in Barnstable, each bit of land is in one of about 10
named sub-towns, and the sub-town is used in the address, and we
probably should special case those, if that really is what Barnstable
people do.

> There are  46 "PC_NAME"s, all the above plus, Buzzards Bay, Cataumet,
> Cumaquid, East Dennis, East Falmouth, East Dennis, East Sandwich,
> Forestdale, Harwichport, Hyannis, Hyannisport, Monument Beach, North
> Chatham, North Falmouth, North Truro, Pocasset, Sagamore, Sagamore Beach,
> South Chatham, South Wellfleet,  South Yarmouth, West Barnstable, West
> Harwich, West Hyannisport, West Yarmouth, Woods Hole&  Yarmouth Port.
>
> Should  addr:city =PC_NAME ?

Almost certainly not.  Those sound like semi-formal names for regions of
towns and not actually part of addresses.


> An OSM Overpass query for place=suburb in Massachusetts lists:
> East Boston
> North End
> Beacon Hill
> Jamaica Plain
> Brighton
> Osterville
> Cotuit
> Nonantum
> Charlestown
> South Boston
> West Roxbury
> Centerville
> Dorchester
> Hyde Park
> Newton Corner
> Marstons Mills
> Roxbury
> West Barnstable
> Back Bay
> Chestnut Hill
> Flynn Manor
> Fenway
> South End
> Allston
> Financial District
> West End
> North End
> Belleville
> Lord Timothy Dexter Industrial Green
> Plum Island
>
> place=hamlet yeilds 1,666 entries
>
> place=village yields 187

These almost certainly come from GNIS, at least hamlet..  They are often
points, and are names for vague areas.  This is historically very
useful, but I have always viewed it was separate from addresses.

OSM has the notion of size with these, so I think Stow is in OSM a
"village", and there is a place=village at the downtown (where people
would say, if you made them give a point, the town is).  This is
implicitly linked (could be a relation) to the level 8 admin boundary.
So many of those line up with towns.  and many do not, hamlets
especially which are name smaller places within towns, like "Lower
Village", "Gleasondale".

It would be interesting to see how many of the names can be matched up,
with both the same name, and a nearby-ish place point.

Some of them seem bogus, like "Financial District" which if you know
you're talking about Boston makes sense, but not on its own.  And Lord
Timothy Dexter Industrial Green is unlikley really a place name, vs the
name of an industrial park, but I don't live in newburyport.

Others are clearly longstanding place names, which is distinct from the
belonging as "suburb".