[OSM-talk] How to improve addressing?

[Russ Nelson]

Jeff Meyer writes:
 > Does anyone have a primer on best practices for improving OSM addressing
 > quality quickly & efficiently?

I've done some research into that. I've done it four ways:
  o Took my county's tax maps and converted them into an import. I
    left the property lines off because, well, because that's an
    insane amount of data. Only put in a single point with an address
    (if there was one -- some property doesn't have a street
    address). Used a centroid of all the property line nodes to place
    the address node (yes, yes, I know, concave &etc).

  o While bicycling in a rural area, I read the mailbox numbers into
    my Columbus V-900. Transcribed them later as single address
    points.

  o In addition to that, I added an address interpolation way along
    all of those points, for two reasons: 1) because I might have
    missed one, and 2) if somebody builds a new house, the address
    interpolation way will give them a likely address.

  o In the village, I traced the houses (hundreds of them) off
    6inch/pixel aerial photos. Then I bicycled every road (it's about
    20 miles of roads) and recorded the address numbers on every
    house. I put the address onto the building way (damn it would be
    nice if JOSM could auto-increment addresses).

The import is least accurate (because you don't know exactly where
inside the property the house is located). The V-900 recording is most
accurate, particularly for the village version where I was able to
assign an address to each building, or if it has multiple numbers, to
individual entrances. The interpolation (the way I did it) was not
less accurate than individual house numbers, but interpolation is
(usually) less accurate.

For the most part, the import is quite accurate, and easily fixed when
wrong.

-- 
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