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Conventions for House Addresses (self.openstreetmap)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by beppi to c/[email protected]

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Hey guys, I know this question is probably answered somewhere on the internet but I just can't seem to find it.

In OSM, I have an address, and on that block of land I have many separate small houses, each with the same house number, but different unit/flat numbers. I could assign housenumber 123 to each but from what I understand, duplicating information is bad.

Is it a good idea to instead omit this information from each house, and draw an area around the entire block with addr tags on that specifying housenumber, suburb, street etc. and each actual house only has unit number and building type?

Thanks guys

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Hi,

Addresses can be really complicated. The full guide is on the wiki: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Addresses

Personally, I would open up JOSM, select all the buildings and slap addr:street and addr:housenumber=123on them. However, I would add addr:unit=XYZ on every one of them (as @[email protected] pointed out as well).

Next question: does every single house have their own letterbox? Or is there one location where all the letterboxes are located? Add a https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Dletter_box with addr:street and addr:housenumber as well!

I don't think that adding an address to the plot of land is very useful (but a name of the project/area might be nice as well). Have a look at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:place for this, place=plot or place=city_block might be appropriate depending on the situation.

[–] beppi 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the reply! Regarding the letterbox,qt least a few of them had theirs in one of those walls with like 9 letterboxes in it so I'll have to check again, but I'll remember to add these from now on

[–] beppi 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sorry another question, in a case where I'm just going by imagery and city council address number things, all Ill know is that all of those houses are units 1-8 or whatever, but now which is which... how would you do this?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

addr:street and addr:housenumber to every object that reasonably has a unit number (so no sheds) for starters. There are a few possible configurations where you could reasonably interpolate unit numbers - eg. situated in a line, or side by side around a turning point - as long as you definitely know at least two. I don't think anyone would hunt you down for interpolating precise numbers in reasonable to obvious cases, but if you want to be sure, there is addr:interpolation (see also https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:addr:*#Tags_for_interpolation_ways)

If you really have no clue, or reason to believe that the numbering are not regular, I'd leave a note on the site - or add a fixme tag - or both.

[–] beppi 1 points 1 year ago

Awesome, thanks alot!!! I'm pretty new and have been mapping out my suburb so I'm just starting to get the hang of things like this

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I would indeed add addr:housenumber= to each unit, there is also addr:unit= which I would prefer over constructions like "addr:housnumber=123/4". Drawing a polygon around the lot for the housenumber sounds usable, for which I would use the residential that should already be there but, preferred method for that (afaik) is a singular address node.

There is probably a section in the wiki that describes, or at least proposes, a setup for precisely this use case.

addend: Another adjacent tag to addr:unit= would be ref=, though with buildings this also is often applied to buildings that already have differend housenumbers.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

That isn't really duplicating information. Duplicating information, would be for example, to have the outline of a building and a single node both with the same information representing the same shop.

In your case you have separate buildings that each happen to share some of the information. Put the full address information on each house. That way there is a clear connection between a single object and it's data, and no additional computation is needed to collect all data to the object.

You can additionally have an area around the buildings with it's full address, if they together represent a single entity.

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