[OSM-talk] Adding Addresses to OSM

[TM]

Yes, that would work once we have all the roads reliably mapped mapped,
but for now anyone wanting to map individual addresses would be stuck
with using nodes. It's not a particularly elegant solution, but it could
later be converted to whatever format we decide. Ideally, these nodes
would somehow be mapped to the corresponding way, but since ways can be
removed and recreated this mapping would not be reliable. Thus,
including the full address as a tag would probably be necessary.

At the moment there isn't even a 1:1 mapping between ways and streets,
although there was talk of implementing a hierarchical way structure
with "superways" consisting of ways. That would at least provide a good
starting point for finding the various ways making up a street.

Another option would be to effectively "lock" a way once a certain
number of users agreed that it was properly mapped. This could be seen
as improving the reliability of the data, or as an elitist move to limit
the wikiness of the project. I don't know. At least it would allow us to
uniquely identify a way and safely refer to it for address data.

Or, we could just focus on streets and roads for now. At least that's
what I'll do.

    /   TM


Dan Putler wrote:
> 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
>