Hi all, I have recently added a load of new buildings in my local area to OSM and would like to add house names and numbers for these buildings.
It’s pretty easy to see how this is done when each house is a separate building, but how is it done for e.g. semi-detached houses and terraces?
I found a wiki page Addresses in the United Kingdom which has some information about the “OSM UK address editor” which splits buildings along land boundaries from the land registry (cadastral parcels), which seems like a great approach. However, the link to the beta release of the map doesn’t work and I can’t find a working link to a released version on https://osmuk.org. Did the project get dropped?
I have worked out how to show the cadastral parcels in the id editor but can’t see how to split the buildings into two addresses.
I think that UK Addresses tool is running as a hidden theme on the main MapComplete site now, but it is still beta AFAIK.
If the tools you are using don’t support splitting area you can add addresses as nodes. If you fancy learning JOSM it does have a terracer plugin.
If you use an Android phone I highly recommend StreetComplete for in person collection. Its address mode will let you add nodes and doors if there’s no building to attach the address to or you want to add a door to a garden flat.
Thanks for your response, from what you’ve said I think I just need to find that link to the hidden profile on MapComplete (or someone who can send it to me).
I can see from the link to the viewer below that it’s doing what I need and giving sensible building splits, looks very useful:
I have been using StreetComplete recently and find it very enjoyable, however it only asks for one address per building and I don’t want to manually tell it there are two addresses for each building if I don’t have to because it will take forever (and may give a worse result).
Welcome! In StreetComplete, instead of answering the address question, which as you said only lets you add one address per building, you can just switch to the address layer (with one of the buttons in the top right corner). This lets you add address nodes (you can add as many as you want of those).
The MapComplete page is here: Addresses in Great Britain. Once you’ve visited it once it should show up on the main page for you.
Another option is listing multiple addresses for a building as a comma or semicolon separate list or hyphenated range. lt’s not as good as separate addresses, but is certainly an improvement over nothing.
I didn’t know that was possible, thanks! Playing around with StreetComplete now, I’m wondering if you can show buildings and addresses at the same time (so you can position the address easily)?
Is there any disadvantage to having an address that is not associated with a building? It seems neater to me to have them tied together but maybe I’m overthinking it.
No rule requiring you to add the address to the building, you can create a node within a building.
Personally, I hardly ever add an address to the building. I nearly always add an address to a node within the building area, with the node located near the front of the building.
Too many buildings have more than one address “points” within, and without entering you can not be certain of the internal layout and properties. So I prefer a node with address and other details such as shop= are also added to the node.
This leads onto trying to use the same system locally, so I’ve ended up using address nodes for nearly all addresses.
I will very rarely add address & property details to the building if clearly a stand alone site such as an Ikea surrounded by a it’s car park.
The address layer in StreetComplete should still show the buildings.
It also shows a “cross hair”. This lets you create a separate address node anywhere, but if you hover it over the building outline (the outer walls) it will create an entrance with an address (you’ll notice the symbol changing).
Also, if use address nodes, then adding addresses essentially becomes a completely separate question to splitting buildings. You can even add addresses in areas where the buildings haven’t been traced yet.
The address layer (or mode as I incorrectly called it) does show buildings if they are present.
the main disadvantage to address noes without traced buildings is that with the limits of consumer GPS in phones etc. it can be a bit difficult to position them accurately. If there is more than one building plan on the street then having the building show can be really useful. Other than that though it doesn’t really make a difference and even when buildings are present there’s no real difference in utility between address on building and address on node inside building.
There’s also address interpolation which can be useful if you’re in a situation where it’s easier to check both ends of a street and skip the middle.
Hmm, it seems the address layer shows buildings that have been in the map for a while, but not the ones I added today…however the buildings layer shows both!
Thanks everyone for the help, I have more than one way of achieving my goal now!
In that case I suspect the building layer is showing them because it’s rendering directly from the downloaded OSM data in order to do the colour rendering and the address mode is just rendering the layer and relying on the underlying Jawg vector tiles for the building outline.
I think Jawg update fairly quickly so it’s probably only be a couple of days.
Yes that’s great if you’re ever in a situation where you want to add addresses in an area where the buildings haven’t been traced yet, and you’re having difficulty positioning the addresses. Every Door lets you switch between OSM as a background and aerial imagery where you should be able to see the buildings
For that matter, the recommend practice if a building can’t be atomised into multiple units (you normally can with semi-detached and terraced houses and is the to-go solution on OSM but exceptions do exist) is to place an address at the building entrance.
On that aside (since it got mentioned), SC will create an entrance if you manually place an address node at a building edge, though this is from exprience only if you add a new one, not for moving an existing address.
Streetcomplete does take a very German view of addresses that does not
really work in the UK. Here buildings do not have addresses, delivery
points do.
When I have played with it I have found there is no way to say 'its not
got a housenumber because its tagged as a building=school and the
address is on the campus area but big things don’t have a number.
I’m always reluctant to do that as it might imply that I wanted someone else to sort out the address info. I guess doing it as a “note to self” and then resolving the note later at home would be OK.
You can sort-of fudge this by saying it has a house name and then entering the name of the school, but note to self and then tagging the area when you get home is probably better. You can also select “Uh…” > “It has no house number” which will cause it to ask for confirmation that it is correctly tagged as a school building and then add nohousenumber=yes to the building.
IIRC StreetComplete is not supposed to ask for addresses of buildings within an existing address tagged area so it the school grounds are already tagged correctly then the address prompt shouldn’t appear.
@InsertUser Now I’m confused. I’ve had a look via the link provided at Addresses in Great Britain and all the addresses near me have a question mark over them. But I know they have full postal addresses because I’ve added them to OSM with josm.
Why don’t they show up as full addresses in mapcomplete?
