[OSM-talk] house numbers revisited

[Andy Robinson (blackadder)]

Frederik Ramm wrote:
>Sent: 17 April 2008 1:00 PM
>To: Martijn van Exel
>Cc: Talk Openstreetmap
>Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] house numbers revisited
>
>Hi,
>
>> As you can see, I employ four tags to indicate house number ranges:
>>
>> * houseno:left-min
>> * houseno:left-max
>> * houseno:left-scheme
>> * houseno:right-min
>> * houseno:right-max
>> * houseno:right-scheme
>>
>> Left and right are relative to the direction if the way.
>> Min is the first house number on either side, again looking in the
>> direction of the way.
>> Max is the last house number on either side, looking in the direction
>> of the way.
>> Scheme can be one of 'even', 'odd' or 'mixed'.
>
>Pitfalls include:
>
>* what if way direction is reversed?
>* what if way is extended, merged, split?
>* what if way provides access to houses with the address of another way
>(corner buildings typically - house is on A street but entry is from B
>street)
>* what do you do with letters? At least in Germany they sometimes have
>2, 4, 6a, 6b, 6c, 6d, 6e, 8...
>* what if there are gaps in numbering? split the way?
>
>Some of this may not seem to important but I would really like to have
>house numbers on the map, and if at all possible I'd like to avoid
>printing a number that doesn't even exist.
>
>I think we somehow need a two-tiered scheme that on one hand
>
>* allows fine-grained tagging of every single house (ideally, if the
>house is drawn as a building, have the information on the building
>object itself; however this would possibly require some way of
>specifying the entrance and/or link to the way it belongs to).
>
>and on the other
>
>* gives us a "number range" option like yours above.
>
>I suspect strong editor support will be required for any of them;
>whether you use relations (which I prefer) or left-right tagging, you'l
>probably want the editor to make sure the user doesn't break too many
>things.
>
>A completely different (and quite OSM-like!) option is dropping all this
>complex logic, left-right-blah tagging, number schemes, relations and
>all, and just put simple nodes: "This is B street number 25". This
>brings redundancy, typos, and all - but we're used to that. It would be
>*extremely* easy to edit, and renderers or routers would have to do a
>little bit of processing to work with the data. Not too hard probably.

This is the approach I've taken. To date I've added quite a lot of house
numbers on nodes in my area with the tags in the form building=residential,
ref=23. Having done a load of them I realised it also needs to have other
address details as well, but probably just street name is sufficient as the
other stuff can be found from the proximity. I'm only placing a node at the
end of building runs/adjacent to each junction or the number of the property
opposite a junction. It's pretty much easy to infer the rest in most
instances. I took my lead from the way they do it at Maporama.

Cheers

Andy

>
>I'm not saying either of these is best. We'll have a little "house
>number hacking workshop" here in Karlsruhe where some of us will try and
>decide on a working scheme and implement this in a renderer/editor if
>possible, and enter a few house numbers for the local area, just to see
>if it works.
>
>Bye
>Frederik
>
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