I’ve just reached my first OSM milestone by confirming all my contact addresses are in OSM. This took considerably longer than expected. I wanted to add the addresses of all my contacts from around the world to OSM so that those addresses will appear in the next map update for the Magic Earth app.

My first step for this milestone was to cull my contacts list for the first time in 20 years. This step took several hours. My next step was to add the addresses of my contacts to OSM if they did not already exist. This step proved to be a very time consuming and frustrating experience, although there were plenty of learnings too.

The first learning which came quite early on was that when postcodes are introduced to a country, parts of the old address are incorrectly removed by the postal service. In one example, my brother was given a new suburb. Unfortunately, people have a tendency to retain the old address and just add the new post code, rather than using the new address in full.

Needless to say people giving out the wrong addresses like my brother makes life difficult for address search engines. A good address search engine needs to be very clever in accommodating this human behaviour. I found the OSM search engine wasn’t very forgiving, while Google search engine was too forgiving at times by giving me the wrong location.

I decided to edit the addresses of my contacts so that the OSM search engine would find the correct location. I didn’t mind changing the address when it was clear that part of the address was wrong like with my brother.

It was obvious to me that Google tries different permutations of the address to find a result, while OSM expects the address to be perfect. I imagine Google’s first permutation in the UK would be to use the post code and street address as that is all that is needed for a location in the UK. If that permutation failed it would try other permutations with the full address until it got a result.

Still, there were 2 areas I thought the OSM search engine should be better at handling and that is street name abbreviations and house numbers. OSM Search couldn’t find a location with Ave, but when I changed the address to Avenue the location was found. Similarly, OSM couldn’t find an address in the Netherlands when the street name preceded the house number, but it could find the address when the house number preceded the street name. The custom in the Netherlands is the street name should precede the house number. I was also disappointed when the OSM search engine wouldn’t always return a location when everything in OSM was mapped except for the house numbers. So, as you can imagine it was quite time consuming to learn OSM Search quirky nature and changing my contact’s addresses to accommodate these quirks.

This reminds me of an earlier post of mine where openstreetmaps.org as the poster child of the OSM community needs to lift it’s game to attract users. The core activity of OSM is addresses, but OSM does not offer to save the addresses for the user in the OSM Account. These addresses with the users permission could be shared with the wider OSM community. There is also the possibility that a user could be turned into a mapper by adding their missing addresses to OSM just like me. My concern is that they wouldn’t be as forgiving of the quirk’s of OSM search.

My next milestone is to map a bus route I use regularly. However, I may go back to adding some more local street businesses first. Long term, I would like to map the indoor of a shopping mall when the indoor mapping of OSM matures more.

Kind Regards