[Talk-us] Address Node Import for San Francisco

Mike N. niceman at att.net
Thu Dec 9 23:09:39 GMT 2010


>First, I've looked at how address nodes have been input manually.  In some places they are just addr:housenumber and addr:street and nothing else.  In other places they include the city and the country and sometimes another administrative level such as state.  Since the last three pieces of information can be fairly easily derived I was thinking of just doing the house number and the street.   The dataset is fairly large so I don't want to include any extra fields if I don't have to.  Is this level of information sufficient?  Or should I include the city and the state and the country in each node?

   I would recommend just addr:housenumber and addr:street.   The reason is that the city, state, etc can be derived from bounding polygons.   In addition, those polygons frequently change.  By not including city, state, etc, there is one less step to go through when the boundaries change.

>Also, there are a large number of places where there are multiple nodes in one location if there is more than one address at that location.  One example would be a house broken into five apartments.  Sometimes they keep one address and use apartment numbers and sometimes each apartment gets its own house number.  In the latter cases there will be five nodes with different addr:housenumber fields but identical addr:street and lat/long coordinates.  Should I keep the individual nodes or should I combine them?  For instance, I could do one node and have addr:housenumber=5;6;7;8;9 or have a node for each address.   Combining nodes would cut the number of nodes imported by about 40% but I fear that it might be harder to work with manually and also not recognized by routers and other software.

   I would recommend a node per address; this matches the existing Wiki convention, and should work with Routers and Nominatum.  Editors don't make it easy to access an individual node out of a stack, but it is not too difficult for the odd case where it might be necessary.
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