I’ve been doing quite a bit of mapping around Lucas Country in Ohio. The vast majority of this editing was done using the Rapid editor. This is mostly because adding so many buildings and addresses is a huge amount of work to do manually, and my hand would start hurting from manually drawing the buildings, which Rapid makes much faster.
I started this work in my free time because I use Organic Maps/CoMaps for navigation, and the lack of address data in the area made it impractical to use.
My question is about the way I’ve been tagging building addresses - I would tag the building area, and then add the address as a point on top of the area, which seems to be way Rapid wants me to do things, but leads to some unexpected consequences. Because the address and building are technically two different tags, it is not possible to properly edit the addresses from CoMaps, and clutters the editor view quite a bit:
Since most of the addresses in this area are single family houses, it doesn’t really make sense to have the addresses separate from the building, so I’m wondering if there’s a quick way I can “merge” the address tag on top of the building into the building itself?
I would point out that it isn’t ‘Rapid making things faster’ you are simply importing building outlines from a 3rd party source. Something that you can do with a number of editors.
As to the addresses: that depends IMHO on what is actually assigned the address in your area. If it is assigned to the plot or the building and there is no other conventions used by other mappers in the vincinity, adding it to the building outline is fine.
I simply wouldn’t let deficenies in the tools you are using make that decision for you.
I know that Rapid just relies on a 3rd party dataset, and I know that I could achieve the same result with something like the MapWithAI plugin for JOSM, but I simply found JOSM way too convoluted and hard to use, and after spending 2+ hours trying to understand the absolute basics, I just gave up, but I’m open to trying it again.
The address tagging convention in my area seems to be adding the address directly to the building’s area tag, instead of assigning a separate address tag. Adhering to my area’s convention is the main reason I’m looking for a way to merge the tags.
I know they are both technically valid, but the convention around my area is to add addresses to the building directly, instead of adding an extra tag. I was relatively new to OSM when I started my project to map Lucas county, so I didn’t really know anything about tagging conventions.
You should probably follow the local convention then. JOSM has some tools that can help with merging address nodes into buildings (select both → ctrl + shift + g / ‘replace geometry’ in the tools menu).
On a side note, is there a directory for local mapping communities for OSM where I could talk to people in the area I’m mapping about conventions and things specific to the area?
Yes, the convention in Ohio and surrounding states is to tag the address on the building (and any point of interest inside of the building). This is because addresses are assigned to parcels but we generally don’t map parcels in OSM. You’d see free-floating address points only if multiple addresses are assigned to a single building, such as in a duplex or strip mall, or if an address is assigned to a parcel that has no structure on it.
For completeness: In Rapid or iD, you can hold down Shift to select both the address point and the surrounding building, then press C (as in “combine”) to merge the address point into the building. The northwesternmost node retains the former address point’s history if it predates that node. Unfortunately, you’d have to perform this merge one building at a time, so JOSM would be more efficient.
Good to know, addresses being treated in the inverse in Italy, moved to separate nodes e.g. the point where the building entrance is. Just now converted a parking node to a parking area with the JOSM Ctrl+Shft+G function and looked, most western seeming to prevail over northern, found it at the red highlighted selected node in the screen shot (Am very much into preserving history, some others not so much regrettably).
Thank you, I’ve been slowly learning JOSM, but ran into the limitation that I can only merge 1 address and building at the same time.
Is there some way this can be done with entire blocks at once using JOSM? At my current rate, it will take me more time to merge the addresses than it took me to add them in the first place.
This is one of the edits that I did while experimenting with merging the geometry in JOSM.
@ezekielfmentioned in OSMUS Slack that JOSM’s Building Tools plugin has a Merge Address Points command under the More Tools ▸ Draw Building Modes menu. I haven’t tried it myself but it sounds useful.
I’ve tried to use the “Merge Address Point” feature, and it mostly seems to work the way I would expect it to, but it leaves the original address point in place even after merging the address into the building itself.
To do this process at a reasonable pace, I would need a tool that can:
Merge the address tag into the building, including the address source, then deletes the separate address tag.
Warns me if I try to merge multiple separate address tags into the same building.
Can do this with many buildings at once.
The ability to do this to many buildings at once is pretty important, since I need to merge thousands of buildings and addresses, and my hand already hurts from:
Shift + Selecting the building and address
Shif + Ctrl + G to merge the tags
Use the mouse to tag the building as “house” and select sources to “all” in this menu
At this rate, I’m looking at days of work. I’m still going to do it, but since my (completely volunteer) time to contribute to OSM is limited, I’m still wondering if there is a more efficient tool to do this.
Is there a forum/chat room dedicated to JOSM, where I can ask questions about JOSM to the people most familiar with it?
You might experiment with JOSM’s Conflation Plugin. You pick your addresses as reference, your buildings as subject, generate matches and merge. I regularly use it to merge sets of address points to buildings.
This might be exactly what I’m looking for. The wiki page for the conflation plugin is also really decent at explaining the way to set it up. I’ve done some small, experimental changes with the tool.
The only problem I’ve ran into so far in my limited experimentation is that any “conflicts” still need to be resolved manually, on a one by one basis (similar to what I explained under step 3 in my previous post).
In my case, most of these conflicts are:
The area is tagged building, and the address is tagged house, I end up resolving the conflict by tagging the area house.
Most of my work has 2 different sources - esri/USA_NAD_Addresses and microsoft/BuildingFootprints, and I end up resolving this by selecting all so both sources are preserved correctly.
Is there some way to make sure I don’t have to resolve the exact same conflict for each individual building I’m conflating?
For the first one see my screenshot, in particular the “Overwrite tags without confirmation” checkbox. What I do is temporarily stage updated building tags into the address nodes, then conflate. The overwrite merges these updates into the existing buildings cleanly.
You might try something similar for the second one. Add a source=esri/USA_NAD_Addresses;microsoft/BuildingFootprints tag to the relevant addresses, then select them as your reference and conflate (you can add building;source to the overwrite checkbox and it’ll cover overwrites for both tags).
In short, any tags you can correctly set in your reference can be carried over as part of the merge.
I might have something set up wrong, since I don’t see the the “Overwrite tags without confirmation” option, or the the “programming” option in the conflation configuration window.
Aha! This one was a mystery to me but I may have found the answer after muddling around in the plugin code - you need to be in Expert Mode. You can set this in your JOSM Preferences, then give JOSM a restart (probably).
