`contact:housenumber` tags in Canada

Communities Canada
1

Hi all,

It came to my attention that there are a small number of contact:housenumber, contact:street and similar tags in Canada. (see Taginfo, Overpass Turbo search)

These were seemingly mostly added by @kartler175 while they were doing other fixes (geometry, topology) prompted by OSM Inspector. (Thank you for the topology fixes!)

They were set on objects like golf courses (Way: ‪Strathcona Golf Course‬ (‪310530875‬) | OpenStreetMap, Way: ‪Club de Golf St-Donat‬ (‪176799160‬) | OpenStreetMap), skiing areas (Way: ‪Mont Tremblant Resort‬ (‪671144531‬) | OpenStreetMap), schools (Way: ‪Jean Steckle Public School‬ (‪206391405‬) | OpenStreetMap), small provincial parks (Relation: ‪Cleveland Beach Provincial Park‬ (‪5341114‬) | OpenStreetMap) and on shops that closed (Node: 6501394138 | OpenStreetMap).

When added by kartler175, in each case they were a retagging from existing addr:housenumber, addr:street tags.

Per wiki Key:contact:* - OpenStreetMap Wiki these tags are “For use when the contact address is not the same as the address of the physical location” but this doesn’t seem to have been the case for the tags set by kartler175, as they are physically near the streets tagged.

(There are a few cases of this tag actually being used properly: Node: ‪Frog Pond Tea & Coffee House‬ (‪11463167300‬) | OpenStreetMap “Mailing address is 209 8th Street East, the entrance is 799 2nd Avenue East.”, Node: ‪Parker PR‬ (‪12247367675‬) | OpenStreetMap on a street corner, and Relation: ‪Wasaga Beach Provincial Park‬ (‪5844478‬) | OpenStreetMap where it matches the location of the park administration office but there are many other entrances to the park.)

I’ve changed a couple of these tags in Ontario today (1, 2, 3, 4).

I am proposing to retag the rest of the uses of contact:street and contact:housenumber to addr:street and addr:housenumber across Canada where the following is true:

  1. there is currently a contact:housenumber but no addr:housenumber tag, and
  2. the current contact:street tag is for a street near the main entrance
2 Likes
2

Emboldened by two thumbs-up and no objections, I cleaned up the points in Ontario and to the west today. I will wait for a couple of days to see if anyone objects before checking through Québec and the Maritimes.

Changesets today:

A few legitimate uses remain west of Québec:

1 Like
3

I use contact:city for old city names that were replaced by new city names after mergers, but which are not recognized by Canada Post (some duplicates would occur for same street and civic number in west of Montreal and east after mergers, or even in Laval which meged in the 70s!)

4

Noted, I will leave those

I am not overly concerned about those duplicates - there’s many High Streets in London that any software using OSM data is already dealing with. But I don’t mind use of contact:city for that (although personally I would lean towards addr:suburb if tagging it at all)

(noting related previous thread Special cases of distinct civil and postal addresses city names - #5 by Jarek)

5

I used addr:borough in the past, but the new boroughs may have different boundaries than the old cities that share their name! I will check the suburb, if it fits.