New user here, hoping someone can help me with my address/location woes.
We have built a new house in a rural location. Frustratingly, its location it incorrectly plotted on virtually every mapping system, by some distance. I have raised this with OS, HERE and Google, but its like banging you head against a wall. Its having a huge effect on us, as deliveries usually fail (including medications). But anyway…
So I’m trying to fix things on OSM myself…and failing. I have added the outline of my house and entered the address. But I have 2 problems;
When searching using the address the location is still plotting in the wrong place, about a mile out.
When I query the address of my new house (hovering the move over the house I have added in the right location) the address it gives a different from the one I have entered and saved, it has inserted a different street name (our actual address is 11 ******* Hill… The address comes back incorrectly as 11 ***** lane, ******** Hill). The problem might be that we live up an un-adopted lane, which looks on most maps like an extension of the named tarmac road that lead up to it (which is the name being in correctly used). This is a double problem, as not only is it wrong, its the actually address of another property down that road.
Any help and advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
The street (actually currently mapped as a track) outside your house doesn’t have a name on it. Whether adding that name will help depends on a couple of things:
o What you’re actually searching for (I can guess the stars in your post, but not the full text you’re searching for)
o What it is you’re searching with.
o How long you wait until after your change before checking that search works.
You’re searching at openstreetmap.org so that uses something called “Nominatim”, which has its own foibles about what it can find and what it can’t. If you’re on a mobile phone app that will probably use something else. See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Search_engines for some of the others.
You also may need to wait a while (up to a month or so for in-app offline search) for the data that is used to be updated.
For more local help, I’d suggest asking in #osm-gb in IRC (see https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/IRC) and saying “can someone help me with an address in $county”. The person who mapped the right of access on the track past your new house will probably be the one who answers
Thanks. The track doesn’t have a name unfortunately. So when I search for 11 p*******d hill, which is my official address, nominatim returns 11 ******* lane, pontesford hill. That’s a different address entirely. It’s not just wrong, and plotting in the wrong place, that’s actually another persons address.
Are you saying that this can be fixed?
I did actually message the person who has been editing the track and other features near me, but they never responded.
I can’t believe how hard this is, I was hoping for more success with OSM due to its nature of being ‘open source’. How wrong was I!
I don’t know how well Nominatim will react to being given an addr:street that doesn’t exist as a street. That might be the problem, or it might be that you need to wait a bit longer. The full documentation on “addr” tags is at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:addr. There are more options to try there.
To add to that, the result you get from Nominatim isn’t really an address, but more a geographic description it generates from the surrounding objects like country, county, etc. or even the street if none is given or if it can’t find a matching street name. If the address doesn’t refer to a street but some territorial zone addr:place should be used instead of addr:street, which should work in your case but also makes problems for Nominatim if the corresponding place is too far away.
edit: I just realized that the hill only exists as peak but not as a place. I’ve confused it with the similarly named place nearby, so it probably won’t work for Nominatim either way unless you also add a corresponding place node/area (e.g. place=isolated dwelling although it’s not really that isolated).
