Addresses in associatedStreet Relations

Communities Switzerland
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In the long list of OSM related things that we likely all have more or less forgotten about one is rather prominent: associatedStreet relations.

Was giving Arni (AG) a look today and most addresses there are members of associatedStreet relations and as a consequence (because the address objects only contain the house number) they all turn up as unmatched/missing in Address Counts per Municipality for Switzerland .

We currently have ~4600 such relations with an unknown number of addresses, but likely a couple of 10’000.

Is there any consensus on if I should just leave them as is (aka as “missing”) or attempt to fix them up (which wont be straight forward) and add them as a warning?

PS: there a similar issue with bare house numbers, were I could do a proximity search for a place or street and see if there is a corresponding GWR address.

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Slightly Off Topic:
As someone new to the community, I believe a discussion about associatedStreet relations in Switzerland is needed. Has there been any discussion about officially deprecating them, or is there any consensus on whether they should still be used? Germany decided to deprecate them in 2019, and I think Switzerland could follow suit. Tagging addresses directly on nodes with addr:street and addr:housenumber has proven simpler and more reliable. Deprecating associatedStreet relations could help streamline address data management and make future updates more efficient.

Would it be more practical to add a column tracking the number of associatedStreet relations in use? This could help quantify their prevalence and provide a clearer estimate of the issue for each municipality.

On a related note, is the approach taken by Paul Wüthrich and Roman Härdi considered standard practice?

Link to the discussion

“Ich gebe mir beim Adressimport grosse Mühe, möglichst nichts zu löschen, damit keine history verloren geht. Bei AssociatedStreet mache ich eine Ausnahme. Die Relation führt bei jedem Objekt zu einer seeeehr mühsamen Nachfrage, deshalb befördere ich die Relation gleich zu Beginn ins Jenseits…”

Roman adds:

“Mach ich genau so. :-)”

Is this considered a common or accepted practice?

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Discussion for example (way down) in Fortschritt Adresserfassung (gute und schlechte Nachricht) - talk-ch - openstreetmap.ch from 2019. It was never that popular to start with, there are ~200’000 streets in the country and as I said above there are ~4600 associatedStreet relations.

As to how to migrate them: the thing is most of them are likely broken/incomplete to start with, so besides adding the full address to the objects with address you would have to faff around with the relation too if you wanted to keep them useful (that is give a link from the street to the addresses) and I very much doubt that that is worth the effort.

2 Likes
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For reference, the vote back then can be found on the wiki. The discussion can be found [on the German forum(associatedStreet-Relationen entfernen?).

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Beim Einpflegen der GWR-Daten in der Nähe von zuhause ist mir aufgefallen, dass viele Adressen-Daten auf Gebäuden und Eingängen rund um Bern ohne addr:street erfasst wurden, was z.B. auch der OSMI der Geofabrik moniert.
Wenn die GWR-Daten korrekt eingepflegt werden, ist aus meiner Sicht die associatedStreet-Relation dann unnötig und wird von mir gelöscht (zumeist mit irgendwas mit “associatedStreet-Relation” im Changeset-Kommentar).

D.h., @SimonPoole ich fände es toll, wenn das Problem der fehlenden addr:street-Tags in Adressdaten als Fehler/Problem in deiner Übersicht auftauchen würde, damit die schwer pflegebaren (und teilweise kaputten/unvollständigen) Relationen mit der Zeit aus der OpenStreetMap-Datenbank verschwinden.

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Es ist einfach so, dass ich technisch Hausnummer+Strasse nehme um eine GWR Kandidaten zu finden, dass geht natürlich nicht wenn keine Strasse vorhanden ist. Es gibt natürlich workarounds zum Beispiel nach Strassen in der Nähe zu suchen, muss ich aber auch zuerst implementieren ;-).