In France, we "import" addresses since ~2010. I can provide some feedbacks here:
- "address on building vs node" : we see two camps here although a majority seems to agree that on densified urban zones, the node model is better because it is easier for multiple addresses on the same building and your routing software will be more accurate even if the node is not "exactly" at the entrance point. Think that "one address per building" and "one building per address" is not valid in many, many cases. - "proliferation of address schemes" : I know only 2 models, the one with all "addr:" tags repeated on the element and the one with the relation "associatedStreet". Again, we have two camps in France, irreconcilable this time, where some contributors prefer the relation. I made recently some stats in France and it seems that both models are co-existing (~50-50%) and in some rare places, there are even both used together (mainly because some applications don't recognize the relation "associatedStreet"). I will not argue for one model or the other since both have advantages and disadvantages, as usual in OSM. I personnally stoped worrying about this since both can work and it's even possible to swap from one model to the other. But what I like is that contributors have the choice. Nobody should be "enforced" to adopt one scheme. Sounds scary in the OSM environment. Where we have a consensus is to not duplicate some tags like "addr:country" or "addr:city". The postcode is another subject and is probably a more country specific subject (in some areas, the postcode is related to an administrative boundary, sometimes it's completely unrelated or hard to define by polygons, etc). Postcode will probably need a better standardization in OSM in the future but today, we accept to duplicate it when it's not possible to define it in the admin boundary. - "addresses before buildings" : it sounds easier to add addresses on buildings than the opposite but is it really true ? I cannot see who is enough authoritative in OSM to decide mapping priorities. Some people like to see their bicycle path first because they use OSM for their bike routes. Other people are fully concentrated on mapping power lines first, before roads, before landuse's. Why not. Who am I to decide what has to be mapped first ? - "address is a feature or an attribut" : the question was already raised in the past without a clear answer. It seems that many people - or even applications - do not care about addresses as a feature and they like to duplicate the same address on all the POI they add into the same building. So when I read that conflation should avoid duplicates, I'm unconvinced because duplicates will come back later, anyway. - it was not mentionned here but OSMI is providing a nice QA tool for addresses ([1]). Pieren [1] http://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/?view=addresses&lon=2.36419&lat=48.85332&zoom=16&opacity=0.58&overlays=buildings,buildings_with_addresses,postal_code,nodes_with_addresses_defined,nodes_with_addresses_interpolated,no_addr_street,street_not_found,interpolation,interpolation_errors,connection_lines,nearest_points,nearest_roads _______________________________________________ Imports mailing list Imports@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports