Irish Addresses
  • Vote Up0Vote Down Jochen_KJochen_K
    The Irish are a lovely people - but when it comes to addresses they are certifiably mad.

    One particular problem is posed by "terraces" - usually several houses built in such a way that each pair of neighbours shares one wall.

    Quite often those terraces have their own street sign - inside a longer street.

    One example:

    In Killarney there's Rock Road, oriented roughly north/south.

    Halfway up Rock Road, on the east side of the road only, there are two street signs for "Allman's Terrace" with a dozen houses between them, numbered from 1 to about 30, then the sequence of numbers for Rock Road continues.

    Is there anything that can be done in OSM to enable Navigator to find these addresses?

    Simply renaming that part of Rock Road to Allman's Terrace isn't a solution, as I've found even crazier combos - where the (asphalt of the) street itself has one name, the terrace on one side has a second name, the terrace on the other side has a third name - all with their own street signs.

    Do we just have to shrug and say "Bad luck if they're this crazy"?
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  • Vote Up0Vote Down hvdwolfhvdwolf
    Currently the addresses are not correct according OSM as they are for example addr:housenumber=13-16. This becomes a label instead of a number in OSM standards. I don't know whether MNF stumbles on this or simply reads it as housenumber "13-16" (but currently it is not reading it anyway, so maybe with street but you don't want that here).
    Correctly tagged this would have the tag: addr:interpolation=13-16 instead of the housenumber tag.

    So if you create an address node (example based on "housenumber" 13-16) it might be picked up.
    addr:city=Killarney
    addr:interpolation=13-16
    addr:postcode=whatever (not added)
    name=Allman's terrace

    The tag  "addr:street=Rock Road" should  indeed be avoided. 

    In Poland, Russia, Japan, Germany, Africa are many examples for addresses without a street. I didn't know this existed as well for Ireland but it doesn't surprise me. Japan, Brazil and Russia also use blocks with housenumbers as address instead of street-housenumber. 

    An example of a "street less" address is Burgau, Dürmentingen in Germany: 
    MNF does handle the addresses correctly here (bit sloppy in positioning them) but I do not know which tags are used to index the addresses. The "Burgau OSM mapper" uses the addr:place=Burgau tag. It is how more mappers do it, but it is advised not to use the tag for this kind of "street less" addressing. 
    If Osmand encounters such an address without street it searches for the smallest surrounding admin boundary which encloses the address, which works nicely as well. 
    As both MNF and the map making are closed source I have no idea how MNF does it.

    So concluding: 
    - Maybe MNF uses the tag addr:place to index the address for Burgau
    - Maybe MNF uses the smallest enclosing admin boundary for Burgau (like OsmAnd)
    - Maybe the housenumber="13-16" in Killarney can't be interpreted (as it is wrong anyway) and it needs to be changed to addr:interpolation=13-16 for MNF to recognise it.

    Some advice from @mdx might be welcome.
  • Vote Up0Vote Down mdxmdx
    This particular address was collected but did not pass conversion process due to missing street name. I see there Gaelic "addr:street:ga"
    "Ardán Almán", but no matching "addr:street". Under which (street) name the houses should be found?
  • Vote Up0Vote Down hvdwolfhvdwolf
    No street name. 
    It is one of those streetless addresses. That's why I gave the example of Burgau  (and the others) where MNF does pick up the right addresses without streetname, and why I asked which data approach the map creation process is using.

    And by the way: the language ga is Irish (native: Gaeilge) according to the iso 639-1 language codes
  • Vote Up0Vote Down mdxmdx
    Well, Burgau is different (see for example https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/240355206)
    it has:
    addr:housenumber     5
    addr:place     Burgau
    addr:street     Burgau
    i.e. at the moment you should be able to find it via street "Burgau". If there are similar examples in Germany, we should add it to group of Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland where "TOWN HOUSE NUMBERS" are collected also from tag "addr:place". Is similar numbering also in other countries?

    p.s. thanks for your correction :ga = Gaeilge not Gaelic

  • Vote Up0Vote Down hvdwolfhvdwolf
    You are right about that streetname for Burgau. I completely missed that. That's actually a big NO in the OSM community. You should never map for applications not being able to interpret addresses the way they really are. This is really adding incorrect information to make sure your app can find that address.

    In Poland there are many, many occurrences of addresses in small communities which really do not have a streetname because the 1-3 streets really have no name (so not simply missing data in OSM), but I don't know these examples. Maybe some of the Polish members in this forum can give good examples. I think @PrzemekSupak  is Polish.

    I don't have direct other examples, but for example in Russia you have addresses that are building names followed with housenumbers in that building, again: addresses without streetnames.
    Also this topic in the russian openstreetmap wiki about key:addr (only russian. use google translate):  http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/RU:Key:addr#.D0.9E.D1.81.D0.BE.D0.B1.D1.8B.D0.B5_.D1.81.D0.BB.D1.83.D1.87.D0.B0.D0.B8


  • Vote Up0Vote Down Jochen_KJochen_K
    I changed the addresses from housenumber to interpolation; we'll have to see (in amonth or two) what MNF now makes of them.

    ...or do the experts have any new ideas for dealing with this?
  • Vote Up0Vote Down Jochen_KJochen_K
    Additional question: I've added a few more "interpolation" tags; there are a number of places I know of (such as the southern end of Rock Road) where there are several (up to four) nameless terraces (at least there are no signs, and none of the inhabitants I asked knew anything about a terrace name), so that now the same numbers appear more than once for the same street name.
    Can this create a problem for MNF, and if so, how can this be resolved?
  • Vote Up0Vote Down mdxmdx
    Well, to be honest it will almost surely fail (in MFN). The necessary conditions are:
    1) add tag "addr:place" where is the name of city/town/village where number should be found
    2) we have to add ireland_osm into list of countries to process "town numbers"

    Note, that "block interpolation" will not work in MFN case, only when it is related to street (i.e. start/end coordinates). This may change in the future.

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