[Talk-us] Interested in importing address points in New York State

[Skyler Hawthorne]

Hello. I'm a relatively new mapper, and I'm mostly working in upstate NY, 
where there is not great coverage outside of roads. I've been adding houses 
manually, but progress is slow and inefficient this way.

I found that NYS publishes GIS data in their "Clearing House", and one of 
the data sets available is address points: 
https://gis.ny.gov/gisdata/inventories/details.cfm?DSID=921

I opened the data in JOSM, and they look spatially accurate, for the most 
part (I noticed some points are off for addresses that don't have recent 
satellite imagery available).

Reading up on the import guidelines, I can see that the license is 
important. However, I am not able to see anything that explicitly states 
one way or another what kind of license the data sets are distributed 
under, and this whether or not it is compatible with the ODBL. I wanted to 
ask if perhaps anyone else had investigated these data sets in the past, 
and what their findings were. If not, is the next step to email someone and 
ask?

I don't have anything like an extensive plan for carrying out an import, 
which is why I did not include the "authoritative" imports mailing list 
yet. However, at a high level, as I am a software engineer by trade, my 
plan is to write a script that reads the shapefiles and an .osm file dump 
as input, does the attribute to tag transformations, and deduplicates with 
the existing data by excluding any address points that already exist in any 
OSM object with equivalent addr:* tags (it might also be necessary to 
inspect all associatedStreet and street relations). It would produce an 
.osm as output that contains nodes with just addr:* tags. This can then be 
opened in JOSM and merged into the standard data layer. I'd probably start 
with a single county and go from there.

As a disclaimer, I do this in my free time, which is in short supply, so 
progress on this would likely be slow. However, I would love if everyone 
could just search for any address and find it.
--
Skyler