Entering Street Address Information?

davesf · 2012-08-18T19:00:19.000Z

How does one enter address range information for a street?

I was just introduced to OpenStreetMap, and it seems quite incredible. Of course the first thing I did was search for my own house. I was disappointed to see that it only finds the “street” of my house, not the actual lat/lon for the house number. I thought, PERFECT, I can help out this great community map system by adding address range / location information for my own house! However, after a bunch of searching, reading the FAQ, and the OSM pdf “book”, I’m lost as to how to do it.

I’ve messed around with the Potlatch 2 editor, and it seems to have an incredible number of detailed settings about the road style, surface, infrastructure, etc, but I can’t see how to enter simple address-range information. I see a way to add a specific waypoint with an address (such as a hotel, park, or some other major landmark POI), but I don’t see a way to put in address range information for a street-block. It also isn’t at all clear that putting in a POI waypoint for my “building → family home” at my specific address is the correct thing to do, or that it would help search find address → LAT/LON mappings correctly.

Which leads to my question… how does one enter address-range information for a street block?

Also, may I humbily suggest that address editing/annotation be made much more obvious and easy. IMO there are a much larger number of potential editors capable of “demonstrating where an address is on the map” than actually editing the map geometry. Harnessing these tiny edits to help flush out what seems to be comparatively absent address information, seems like it could be really valuable.

Tordanik · 2012-08-19T01:02:41.000Z

Hello, and welcome to OpenStreetMap!

There are actually several methods for adding an address to OSM, depending on how much effort you want to put in.

The most detailed approach is to trace the outline of the building from the background images, mark it as a “building”, go to its address tab and enter the address. This is an example from your area.
A less detailed variant is to do the same as above, except you don’t draw a building outline, but only put a single node somewhere within the building. This would be quite similar to placing a POI for hotels or other amenities.
Finally, a third option is address interpolation. This is somewhat different from and more complex than the others, so it might be a bit overwhelming for a beginner. I’m mentioning it anyway for the sake of completeness, and because it is used by some who want to add a large amount of house numbers very quickly and are not interested in per-building accuracy. Using this style, you draw a line from the first to the last building within a sequence of house numbers. You add addresses to the start and end point as in variant 2. But then you select the line between the two points, switch to the “advanced” mode of Potlatch 2, and add a tag “addr:interpolation=all” (if all numbers between the first and last can be found on that line), “addr:interpolation=even” (even numbers only), or “addr:interpolation=all” (odd numbers only) to the line.

By the way, I fully agree that adding addresses is a common use case and should be made as easy as possible by Potlatch.