[Talk-us] Address Lookup

[Val Kartchner]

On Wed, 2010-05-19 at 08:54 -0500, Lord-Castillo, Brett wrote:
> If someone were to use OSM for dispatching, dispatching software generally requires a destination address to be associated with a corresponding street in order to dispatch to an address point (as opposed to dispatching to an interpolated street geocode). That would be one reason for associating objects with the streets they are on. It is also useful for non-USPS situs addresses (for example, parcel lot addresses for office buildings or condos).
> 
> Brett Lord-Castillo
> Information Systems Designer/GIS Programmer
> St. Louis County Police
> Office of Emergency Management
> 14847 Ladue Bluffs Crossing Drive
> Chesterfield, MO 63017
> Office: 314-628-5400
> Fax: 314-628-5508
> Direct: 314-628-5407
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> 
> Date: Tue, 18 May 2010 23:00:45 -0400
> From: "David ``Smith''" <vidthekid at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Street Naming Conventions
> To: talk-us at openstreetmap.org
> Message-ID:
> 	<AANLkTinvuGzSB2FSxIcwduebb6IP7Wdk7SMI1O-2pI05 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
> 
> On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 10:39 AM, Phil! Gold <phil_g at pobox.com> wrote:
> > * David ``Smith'' <vidthekid at gmail.com> [2010-05-14 23:58 -0400]:
> >> 5) The value of "addr:street=*" should contain the abbreviated form of
> >> the street name according to USPS standards, regardless of the way the
> >> street name is signed.
> >
> > The point of addr:street is to associate the address to a particular road,
> > so its value needs to match the name of the road. ?(There's also the
> > associatedStreet relation, but more people use the addr:street tag.)
> 
> As Frederik already asserted, that's incorrect.  But if for some
> reason you need to associate an object with a street without using an
> AssociatedStreet relation, you could always give the street its own
> addr:street tag with the same value as all of the objects along it,
> which uses the same USPS-based abbreviation.  But I'm not sure what is
> accomplished by associating objects with the street they're on.  (As
> far as I know, the original point of the associatedStreet relation was
> to automatically imply addr:street values for all of the objects by
> using the street's name or addr:street value.  What you said is kind
> of backwards from that.)

The goal of Open Street Map is to eventually do everything that
commercial map products do.  This would include address lookup.

I've looked around and the way of associating addresses with streets
doesn't seem to work very well.  The simplest way (requiring the fewest
nodes) still requires a lot of work.

For instance, for an example I've picked a street around my area: West
2550 North.  This is just the ways needed for the streets themselves.
(I didn't include the names on the cross streets because they don't
matter for this example.)

A    B          C   D   E
|    |          |   |   |
|    |          |   |   |
+--+-+--+---+---+---+---+--
   |    |   |   |   |   |
   |    |   |   |   |   |
   F    G   H

>From what I understand, next to each place where another street
intersects this street I will have to create another node (on each side
of the street) tagged with "addr:street" and "addr:housenumber".  I will
need to connect the nodes on each side of the street with a relation.
The relation I will need to tag with "addr:interpolation" and even/odd,
as appropriate.  This makes the "simple" street above now look like
this:

A    B          C   D   E
|    |          |   |   |
|    |          |   |   |
*----*--*---*---*---*---*-*
+--+-+--+---+---+---+---+--
*----*--*---*---*---*---*-*
   |    |   |   |   |   |
   |    |   |   |   |   |
   F    G   H

This is a LOT of data to manually add.  Is there a simpler way?

No, I don't have a better idea.

- Val -