Before the recent GNIS mass load, I had created quite a few point of interest nodes for schools, churches, libraries, and fire stations in my area. Many of them, including all of the public schools, were duplicated with GNIS nodes. The JOSM node merge solved that easily where I found them. I used XAPI with wget to pull down an OSM file containing just the nodes of those types (search by amenity), which I could edit in JOSM and upload.

When I first created many of them, I put the street address in a tag because I figured it would be useful later. I couldn't find any consensus when I started on address tags, so I just put the address as one long string in a "street_address" tag. Nobody else uses it, but it was at least readable. I since found that the "addr:" namespace used in the Karlsruhe addressing system seems to fit well for these POI nodes.

I wrote a perl script to rewrite the tags. It parses the street_address tag and creates the number, street, city, state, and postal code tags, and removes the street_address tag. I had a few hundred of them, and this fixed them in short time. It probably took more time to write than fixing them by hand would have taken, but it was more fun :-)