street intersections vs street numbers
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Normally a postal address is made of street name, number, postcode, town, country. It almost never occurred to me to be told "please, come and find us, the address is XX rd at the intersection with YY Rd". On the other hand, if one is using a navigator to find and navigate to un unknown place it is very unlikely he will know which intersection to which road is the closest to the final destination.Why has the system in NavFree 11 been set to recognize intersections and not numbers? Is is a matter of maps? Is it that I didn't find the correct settings? Does the commercial version use the canonical system or is it an unavoidable built-in feature of navigator?Thanks to all explanationsCIaoAdri
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No doubt house numbers are much more useful than intersections, and mapfactor free does support them where data available. The problem likely, however, is that the underlying map data from OpenStreetMap used by the free version doesn't yet have many house numbers recorded for your area.Although the OpenStreetMap data does have about 14 million house numbers by now [1] and is constantly growing, on a world wide scale that is unfortunately not particularly many yet.It would be great if you could go over to openstreetmap.org, register an account and e.g. add the house numbers of the street you live on. Hopefully that shouldn't take long and if enough people do this, the house number coverage in OpenStreetMap will rapidly increase, which will in return directly benefit everyone using mapfactor free or any of the many other programs based on OpenStreetMap data.If you have any questions of how to add / map house numbers in OpenStreetMap feel free to ask in one of the many OpenStreetMap communications channels, or if you post it here, I am sure someone will help you as well.
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Intersections are extra feature - if you do not have house number (street number) you can specify it more precisely by intersection. It is most likely problem of the map or the conversion. Please check openstreetmap.org if you see given house number. Note, that currently (July 2011) only address with name of the street are "snapped" on the road.
thanks
Martin
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Martin,in order to specify the intersection you need knowledge of the area, in which case a navigator would not be needed. In other cases an intersection is not available. Would the commercial version do the same or would it accept the input of street numbers?Is there a trial for the commercial version? EVen a 1-day trial would tell me if I can use it flawlessly on my car pc. ThanksAdri
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Hello,
I agree with Adri. It is more likely and practical to input house numbers when searching for a specific location or setting the destination of a navigation route than to have at hand the information about intersections. This intersection "thing" presumes that one - which does not know the place - would have to previously and separately look up the information on intersections, perhaps using a different map software. This becomes especially difficult if you want to stay offline (i.e. no data charges and no wifi in the car).
Is there a setting in the software that I could change or is this a burnt-in "feature" of the software?
I'm using the free Navigator for Android. 0.9.96
Thanks,
Cesar
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That would be great, I personally ignored the functionality was already implemented. May be what's misleading is the sw interface that immediately asks for intersections, and not even all of them. Should I take your words as to say that if there were street numbers available in the dataset the program would automatically switch to a "street-number mode" if I can call it that way?Many thanksCIaoAdriano
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I think search has a number of problems. Eg,
- South Molton, London/Westminster has house numbers in OSM, but MapFactor cannot find any number. Same for St Bedes Gardens, Cambridge.
- If I try to search UK->London->Oxford Street, it cannot find anything (it's one of the most famous streets of London!). After a while I realised that I should do UK->City of Westminster->Oxford Street. Unfortunately most of people who go there don't have a clue that London is organised in areas and hence this way of searching is useless.
Overall, I've tried several OSM-based apps and my impression is address search with OSM is too poor, either beacuse of lack of functionality or lack of data. It can be compensated with Google search when available, but this means you can't work offline and for anyone who happen to go abroad and face roaming non-offline GPS apps are almost useless.
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Marco,
I can confirm serious problem in July 2012 data computed on one particular machine :(. It is related to house numbers (there are none) as well as to administrative areas. Influenced are following countries:
argentina_osm1.out french_guiana_osm1.out
argentina_osm2.out gabon_osm1.out
azerbaijan_osm1.out gaza_strip_osm1.out
azerbaijan_osm2.out ghana_osm1.out
canada_osm1.out gibraltar_osm1.out
china_osm1.out guam_osm1.out
congo_osm1.out guernsey_osm1.out
crozet_islands_osm1.out guinea_bissau_osm1.out
cyprus_osm1.out guyana_osm1.out
denmark_osm1.out india_osm1.out
djibouti_osm1.out indonesia_osm1.out
dominican_republic_osm1.out isle_of_man_osm1.out
ecuador_osm1.out italy_osm1.out
equatorial_guinea_osm1.out japan_osm1.out
eritrea_osm1.out united_kingdom_osm1.out
ethiopia_osm1.out united_kingdom_osm2.out
federated_states_of_micronesia_osm1.out usa_california_osm1.out
fiji_osm1.out
We may recompute the data from July planet (even data from August planet are available for the majority of the world).
thank you for your report
Martin
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Good to know this can be fixed!
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After reading the entire discussion, I still don't find any reason behind not adding the housing number part on Navigator. I think It really misses the whole entire purpose of the navigation. I thought that the point of navigation is to make our lives easier, and not having the need to look up map data ourselves.
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What would have been nice is for Navigator to show the street name in the Map (highlight the relevant streetname) and let user select which intersection is the nearest as many streetnames are missing from OSM.
JJ
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may be I do not understand, but you can highlight street, just click Show on map
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You can work around the problem by selecting the address on the Google tab where you can enter the street number, street, city and then type Navigate. This will take you to the right address.
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