This post will cover how to enter housenumbers quickly, and how to tag them in such a way that any mapper using streetcomplete will get tasks to tag the buildings as housenumbers.

This post assumes that you use JOSM. This is also focusing mainly on drawing suburban housing in the UK, as this post draws from my current experiences. A lot of this post may not be applicable everywhere else, but some of it could be useful to you.

What I will cover:

• Streetcomplete housenumber quest preparation
• BuildingTools (tips and tricks)
• Lasso/free Select & Utilsplugin2
• Terracer
• Extrude Tool
• JOSM Copy & Paste (+ adjustment, such as rotate/resize)

Streetcomplete tagging

Streetcomplete is an easy to use app for android (and maybe for IOS soon) that allows users who have no understanding of openstreetmap to contribute to the map. However, due to this nature of data input (tasks), it can only improve on already existing data.

One of the critical missing pieces of data in the UK is housenumbers. This has to be entered manually. Currently, it isn’t really something a beginner can do, due to the methods of surveying housenumbers requiring intermediate knowledge of openstreetmap. There are not that many intermediate mappers, and since housenumbers/housenames are present on every single house, geography limits how many housenumbers a intermediate mapper can map.

However, on the other hand, anyone can make 1000s of buildings quickly using JOSM. Once this is done correctly, housenumber quests will show up when someone installs StreetComplete. What is effectively means is anyone, even people without any understanding of OSM, can map housenumbers, which is critical data.

In order to make buildings show up as housenumber quests in Streetcomplete, they CANNOT be tagged “building=yes”

Rather, this is the tagging I use & recommend:

1. building=house
2. addr:street=xyz

It is essential to tag the “building=house” tag. Otherwise the streetcomplete quest will not show up.

It is also important to add the street tag. Otherwise, when someone enters data using Streetcomplete, the house will have only a housenumber, with no street. This is not useful.

It is also extremely important to split entire buildings (such as terraces or semi detached houses into individual houses using the terracer plugin, so that housenumbers can be entered for these individual houses). Due to this, it is better to use building=house instead of “building=semidetached_house” or “building=terrace” or “building=detached”. (Make sure to split these buildings, however).

These are the building types streetcomplete accepts (in order to display a housenumber quest):

house, residential, apartments, detached, terrace, hotel, dormitory, houseboat, school, civic, college, university, public, hospital, kindergarten, train_station, retail, commercial

One very useful trick to make this tagging scheme easier will be covered in the buildingtools section

BuildingTools

I am sure you know how to use buildingtools to draw simple images. So I will use this section to cover advanced tips.

Firstly, if you want to draw extending sections of a building, you can draw one building, and another building that covers the extending part. Select both of them, and press Shift+J to join them. Make sure to merge nodes that are very close together by selecting the close-together nodes them pressing “M”, and making the buildings rectangular using the “Q” button.

I personally, however , when you are initially drawing buildings, it is not worth the time to draw to draw extruding parts. Drawing extruding parts takes lots of time, and often negates some of the time benefits being able to draw buildings quickly. This can be done later, when you are finished drawing the buildings and making them streetcomplete-ready. Also, if you are going to use the terracer plugin, make sure that you terracer the main section of the building before adding extending parts.

Drawing extruding parts is time consuming, and is not necessary for mapping housenumbers. It should be something you want to do later.

Streetcomplete tagging scheme

In order to automatically apply the “streetcomplete tagging scheme” I described earlier, you can do this:

1. Go to Data –> Set Buildings Size (Ctrl+Alt+B)
2. Select advanced
3. Add the tags “building=house”

This does mean that you have to add the street tags, but the next section will cover how to do this easily.

Free Select & UtilsPlugin2

Make sure you have the utilsplugin2 installed.

In order to add street tags to all the buildings on a street, firstly select the buildings using the lasso select. Press “S” to go to select mode, and if there isn’t a litlle “lasso” or “rope” to the next to your mouse, press again, then you will see one. This allows you to freely move around the mouse to select a lot of buildings.

If you cannot select all the buildings in one go, simply select all the ones you can, move the map, and then do SHIFT+free select. Holding shift during the free select will add the new selection to your current selection.

Here is where utilsplugin2 comes in handy. This selection task will have selected all the nodes too, which we don’t want to tag. Simply press Ctrl+U to deselect all the nodes. Just like that, only buildings will be selected.

Now check that you have not accidentally selected some roads, or other irrelevant ways. To deselect these, press CTRL+Click on them. This will lead to them being deselected.

Now you can modify the tags of multiple buildings at a time, such as adding the name of the street to them for example.

What should you do if you cannot tell which street a house belongs to?

This can happen when a house is at an junction between two streets. Firstly, try and see where the exit of the driveway is. This will likely indicate which street the house is on. If you are still not sure, there are a few ways of solving the problem.

1. You can leave the street empty, in which can if house-numbers are entered in Streetcomplete, then they won’t serve much use. HOWEVER, housenumbers without addr:street tags show up as pink dots on OSM inspector, so this can be found.
2. Another solution is to guess the street, and add a fixme tag indicating that you are unsure of the street.

The first solution is better if you are not going to be the one surveying the housenumbers. This is because if a addr:housenumber does not have a corresponding street name, then Streetcomplete asks the user to enter the streetname as a quest. However, if you are the one who is going to be surveying the area, then maybe it is better to add fixme tags, as after surveying with Streetcomplete, you can open up JOSM and search for “fixme=*” to find and quickly fix all those fixme tags.

Terracer plugin

This plugin is incredibly useful for semi-detached houses and terraces. It is very important that you split buildings into individual houses, because when housenumbers need to be added

1. Draw the entire building.
2. Look in the private garden (from aerial imagery) to see fences. Where you see a fence is where one individual house ends and another one starts.
3. For example, a terrace with 3 fences mean there are four individual houses.
4. Draw the terrace/semdetached-house.
5. Press SHIFT-T to open the terracer.
6. Change the number of segments to the number of houses there are. For example, if there were 3 fences in the backyard, change the number of segments to 4.
7. Add the street tag as well. This way you don’t have to enter it later.

How to recognise when to terrace a building with examples.

Fences in the back garden is one of the most effective ways.

That image showed that the building had one fence seperating it, therefore it was a semi detached house.

Here you can see 11 fences seperating each house of the building (and one on the rightmost edge). If there are 11 fences, that means there will be 12 individual houses. Therefore, in the Terracer plugin you change the number of “segments” to 12.

Change in building roof colour may also indicate different individual houses. If two houses look very similar/identical and are in the same area, they probably have the same number of “segments”.

Extrude Tool

This is a useful way of drawing extended sections of buildings. In many cases, it is more efficient that using the SHIFT+J method of the building tools plugin.

Press x to use the extude tool. You can then select a building, and double-click to add nodes along the way. The drag to extend or reduce a section of the way between two nodes.

Here is a useful gif from the JOSM wiki:

Copy-Paste

Copying & Pasting is an incredibly effective method of drawing tons of identical buildings quickly. In fact this is the most useful tool if you want to draw lots of buildings very fast. The caveat is that if a area is built so that every building is shaped differently, then this hampers your ability to draw buildings very quickly. If you can choose between drawing identical building areas and areas where each building is different, I would recommend doing the areas where many buildings are identical first, as you can get more done much more quickly.

Firstly make sure you have added all the tags you want to the building you want to copy (street, building=house). Make sure you have terrace Then select on the building(s) and press ctrl-c to copy them.

Position your mouse in the centre of the next identical building and press paste. This will paste the building. If the building is too small or big, you can readjust by holding CTRL+ALT and then dragigng . If the building is rotated slightly, you can rotate it by holding CTRL+SHIFT and then dragging. If it is in the wrong position, drag the house into the right position.

If it is slightly rotated/needs resizing and in the wrong position, you can do the CTRL+SHIFT or CTRL+ALT trick, however, after that, let go of the keyboard, but do not let go of the mouse. This will allow you to move around the house(s), effectively meaning you can rotate/resize and move it in one go, doing both tasks at once.

Contrary to my advice near the start of this post, if all the identical buildings have the same extruding part, then it is a good idea to draw the extruding part on the first building, as you can copy it over to the other buildings.

On the other hand, if the buildings main shape is the same, but the extruding parts are different, then you can still copy & paste, just simply don’t draw the extruding parts on the initial building.

Here is an example of that. If you look closely, you can see the extruding parts of these buildings are slightly different.

These tricks should allow you to copy buildings quickly.

Bonuses

Postcodes (UK only)

Postcodes are available under an open dataset known as “Codepoint”. You can add postcode imagery to JOSM using the following steops.

1. Open imagery preferences (Imagery –> Imagery Preferences…)
2. Click on the “TMS” button at the bottom right of the window
3. Enter this URL in the First box: https://www.raggedred.net/tiles/codepoint/{zoom}/{x}/{y}.png
4. Leave the maxiumum zoom field empty.
5. Give this imagery a name, such as “UK Postcodes”.
6. Press Okay to save the imagery then Okay again to save the settings.
7. You can now display postcodes on top of your current imagery.

When you are adding housenumbers, firstly you should download the data from OSM, then add Bing imagery (or other good imageries).

After this you can choose “Uk postcodes” on top, and postcodes will be displayed in red. When drawing buildings, you can then add postcodes to these buildings.