[Talk-us] Addresses and Tiger

[Alan Millar]

> Can/should this be done with relations instead of separate paths?  The
> idea is to have it stick to the road.  With this it creates a lot more
> nodes, and there is no easy way to manually get the spacing right
> between the road and the addresses if something is moved.  Also the
> spacing needed is render dependent.

Can it be done with relations instead of [or in addition to] separate
paths?  Yes.  Should it be done instead?  No.

Sure, the majority of addresses are for houses that are easily,
unambiguously identified with the street that their address belongs to. 
But reality I've seen is that there are great numbers of exceptions, and
so the Karlsruhe schema is necessary to indicate where an addressed
building actually is.

Take a look at the Clackamas Corner library:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/365787985

Now find its street, SE 82nd Ave.  It is more than half a mile away.  And
the library is in a strip of stores, so an addressing way would/could
apply here.

While a relation on the street could be useful for most addresses, it is
not sufficient for all.  There is nothing stopping anyone from
implementing both, though.

> Wouldn't having the addresses connected to the road better for routing as
> well?

I haven't seen any actual implementations with a relations-based system,
so I couldn't say if it would be better. But openrouteservice.org has
already implemented it with the Karlsruhe schema.  For example, see
openrouteservice.org and put in

start:  Karlsruhe Julius-Bergmann-Straße 5
end: Karlsruhe Ellmendinger Straße 60

It clearly routes well, using the interpolation ways.  And in the case of
the Clackamas library above, SE 82nd Ave is not the best way to get to the
library from quite a few directions, so the Karlsruhe scheme will work
better.

Now we just need to convince openrouteservice.org to expand outside Europe
:-)

Regards,

- Alan