[Talk-us] [OSM-talk] TIGER Addressing Import

[Mike N.]

> My goal is to get the addresses imported into OSM this time
> around.

   I agree - most newbies' first usage of openstreetmap.org is to type their 
street address, then not look further when nothing is found.    (I know we 
aren't serving as a real time reference site, but some of these people don't 
take it seriously and look further if it can't locate their address)

> * Some multi-segment TIGER roads have only a single address range.
>  Do we create segments for each road segment and evenly divide the
>  addresses?  Or, do we draw a single address segment going from the
>  first to last node?

   It needs to follow the road way to some extent, but it might be possible 
to simplify by reducing node count so that it doesn't exactly follow the 
road.   In the samples I have seen, house placement is much different than 
the road path when there is a curve.

   A final note, I don't know how much address data already exists in OSM, 
but it would be good to priority to any existing US data.    Now that I 
actually read the Tiger documentation, I find that the addressing ranges are 
intentionally general so as not to cross the privacy limits set by law for 
the US Census bureau.   So any data gathered by first hand survey 
observation will be more accurate than general Tiger data.   All those GPS 
surveyors from back in July won't translate to exact address ranges in 
released data in the future.