[OSM-talk] Adding Addresses to OSM

[Dan Putler]

I've been following this thread with some interest since I'm a member  
of an open source postal address geocoder project (PAGC,  
www.pagcgeo.org). It turns out that the database that converts  
addresses to Lon/Lat coordinates for some countries probably isn't  
actually a database per se. Rather, it uses what is known as an  
address ranged road network file, which has a structure very similar  
to the one that Thomas Walraet suggested in that house numbers on  
both the right and left side of the street at both the end and start  
of a way are included as attributes of the way. What a postal address  
geocoder does is match an address to the correct way (sometimes a  
difficult task), and then interpolates the location of particular  
address along that way, returning the interpolated Lon/Lat. If you  
are interested in the structure of one of these files as an example,  
take a look at either a US TIGER/Line file (you can pick one up from  
http://xastir.tamu.edu) or a Statistics Canada 2005 RNF file (which  
can be obtained from http://geodepot.statcan.ca/Diss/ 
2006Dissemination/Data/FRR_RNF_e.cfm, take the one for the province  
of Prince Edward Island to minimize your download time).

The goal of PAGC is to work with road network files for any country,  
but it seems that only Canada and the US have publicly available road  
network files. Consequently, we are hoping that OSM can provide the  
basis for publicly available road network files for places outside of  
northern North America.

Dan

On 13-Sep-06, at 10:26 AM, Stephan Schildberg wrote:

> This implies for me that you are collecting data in the country, you
> have to drive long to come toa farm or a house. In a region like  
> that I
> would agree, that from an economic and ecologiy point of view you  
> are right!
> Image me, mapping a city where 1,7 Million people live. With 2  OSM
> affiliated you can imagine this would be a bit too frustrating, making
> notes and NODES for each house! I think OSM is an intersting project,
> but it's certainly not that interesting for me, that I want to spend
> years on it.
> We make of course pr for the project, to get HELP here, because we  
> want
> to have the usage of a map for the whole city, soon, this is no ZEN.
>
> Stephan.
>
>>  Collecting address data should be a joke when compared to collecting
>> GPS data.
>
>
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