Why can some house numbers be found in search (nominatim) but not in any feature/tag?

Help and support
1

Hi! I’m very new to OSM so I apologize if this should be obvious or I’m describing it poorly.

I’m interested in improving house numbers in my area, and am trying to understand what information is already there. As an example, if I zoom in on 868 S Reed Ct in Lakewood, CO, no house numbers show on the map. OsmAnd also can’t find the address. However, searching in the search bar on openstreetmap.org does bring me to almost exactly the right location. The result is from Nominatim, and only links to the way (S Reed Ct), not any feature tagged with the house number. Is there an interpolation or some other feature that I’m not seeing that gives the house number? If not how is Nominatim finding it when OsmAnd can’t?

Thanks!

2

I believe that Nominatim falls back to using other data sources for addresses if it does not exist in OSM.

Were I in your area, I would be walking the neighborhood collecting addresses.

3

Pretty spot on, based on the Nominatim debug output it looks like it’s getting the location based on TIGER data.

https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search.php?q=868+S+Reed+Ct&dedupe=0&accept-language=en-US%2Cen&format=jsonv2&debug=1

4

Welcome. Totally fair question! I think the others above have the correct answer covered.

Just wanted to add, it looks like the National Address Database covers Lakewood, CO. I know some people are working on importing NAD data, not sure what the status of that project is or if Colorado is in their plans though!

5

Thanks all! This makes sense now. I’ll definitely check out that NAD project and see if I could contribute. I’ll read more about the TIGER data too and how it could be used, I wonder if OsmAnd could have a similar fallback.