Should we import vicmap address data for victoria?

Communities Oceania
, ,
26

Oh yes, Coloured Streets is awesome. A must-have when adding/verifying all that address data.

Even better is installing the Conflation plugin:

I first found out about it from @watmildon’s fantastic User Diary:

This lets you:

  • Select all buildings/addresses.
  • Mass merge these 2 together.
    • (Or one-by-one if you wanted to too!)

It will also take care of:

  • Calculating the closest building based on centers.
    • Giving you a “Distance” score (which you can sort by)!
  • Only one unique building gets one unique address!
    • If you have something like 2 building=semidetached_houses, it will figure out which address node is closest to which half of the building.

and it will even:

  • Draw colored arrows

so you know exactly what address will get assigned to what building ahead of time. :slight_smile:

Here are a few tricks I learned since reading @watmildon’s post:

How to Conflate Addresses

Getting Data Prepped in the “Conflation” Plugin

In JOSM, after installing the Conflation plugin:

0. Press on the little “pin” icon in the upper-right corner.

(This will “undock” the Conflation panel. Drag it to the side and out of the way.)

1. In the “Conflation” window:

  • Press the “Configure” button.

You will see a bunch of buttons/settings in the “Configure conflation settings” window. For now:

  • Drag this window to the side too.

2. In JOSM’s main window, where the map data is:

  • Highlight all your address nodes.

3. In the conflation window with all the buttons.

Next to “Reference”:

  • Press the “Freeze” button.

4. Back in JOSM’s main window:

  • Highlight all your buildings.

5. In the conflation window with all the buttons.

Next to “Subject”:

  • Press the “Freeze” button.

6. Now, you can:

  • Press the “Generate matches” button.

Tip 1: Easy trick to remember:

  • “Reference” for addresses.
  • “Subject” for buildings.

Now, the “Conflation” window will pop back up, with everything scored.

You’ll then see 3 tabs:

  • Matches
    • This is the addresses that correctly found a building.
  • Reference Only
    • Addresses that didn’t find anything.
  • Subject Only
    • This is buildings that DID NOT find an address.
      • (You can double-click on the items in this list to jump to it on the map, then you can see what’s going on, and manually drag the address node and regenerate if needed.)

Then, what I like to do is…

Conflation: Checking/Merging the Data

Go to the “Matches” tab:

  • Sort by “Distance”.
    • Low numbers = high confidence.
    • High numbers = low confidence.

You can now:

  • Double-Click to jump to its location on the map.

and:

  • Left-Click to highlight.
  • Press the “Conflate” button.

This will merge the address+building together, just like the “Replace Geometry” button.

Tip 2: I like to verify about 10 at a time, then I can:

  • Shift+Click to highlight multiple.
  • Press the “Conflate” button.

I also like to start from the worst first.

(So starting from the highest distance, then work my way down.)

Tip 3: Even better, I make heavy use of JOSM’s “Filters”:

which helps hide/unhide stuff on the map, so I could see what data is missing.

For example, I use this to completely hide stuff:

  • "addr:housenumber"="*"
    • Hide anything “with an address” already on it.
  • -"addr:unit"="*"
    • Only show me “houses with a unit”.

Or, I can focus only on certain types:

  • -building=house
    • Only show me “houses”.
  • -building=semidetached_house
  • -building=apartments
  • -building=commercial
    • Only show me “businesses”.

so I can use that to quickly select and focus ONLY on certain building types. :slight_smile:

(For example, semi-detatched halves of houses are more dense, and a bit harder to merge addresses on. So take care of all those “hard ones” first, then you can purely focus on the easy houses next!)

I then redo Steps 4–6 as needed.