Thanks for your efforts. It’s great to see improvements to the map like this.

I notice you’re using iD. iD is a great way of getting started with OpenStreetMap editing (without iD, I likely never would have started editing), or for making quick changes, but for adding addresses, JOSM is much better.

JOSM takes a bit of getting used to, but it’ll pay back quickly.

The buildings tool allows you to easily and quickly draw buildings or change the shape of existing ones. See Mapbox’s fast building tracing article for a good explanation.

The JOSM Terracer plugin is a huge time-saver for adding terraced houses to the map, or even splitting buildings containing two semi-detached houses. You draw the outline for the whole terrace (rather than for all the houses) and then “terrace” that by entering the start and end numbers.

Another really useful tool in JOSM for address mapping is the “coloured streets” style. It colour codes buildings and the street they’re on (addr:street) in the same colour, letting you easily see at a glance which buildings do not have an addr:street or may have an incorrect addr:street. See also my diary entry about the coloured streets style.

JOSM’s validator can also help spot mistakes, like accidentally duplicating a house number on a street.

Rory McCann made a useful video showing some advanced building mapping tricks for JOSM.

I’ve also been adding lots of addresses in Cheltenham and without JOSM it would take many times longer, and the results wouldn’t be as good.

You can pretty easily do this in JOSM though. Simply select all the housesnumbers and buildings on a street using free-select, then press Ctrl-Shift-J to merge all the ADDRESS nodes with buildings.

Are you referring to this diary entry? I see the bit about free-select / lasso, but not about joining address nodes to building ways. Did I miss it?

In my version of JOSM, Ctrl-Shift-J switches to rotation mode. I have utilsplugin2 enabled.

Effectively, yes. The correct OSM terminology is nodes, so it is a file that effectively contains multiple housenumber nodes.

OK, I see. I usually place house numbers on the building ways themselves (it seems neater to me), so I suppose your app won’t be able to do that until if/when you start using OSM data. I understand that complicates things though.

As for Vespucci’s prediction logic, I don’t know how it works, but here is how mine works:

If the housenumber is an integer, I simply increment that integer. If it isn’t, I strip the housenumber of all of the non-integer characters, then increment the resulting integer.

This works, for example, to increment “26a” to “27”, but it won’t work for something like “19-100” to “19-101”.

Thanks for the explanation. Given a few house numbers, the prediction in Vespucci handles odd and even numbers correctly too, which is useful.

This app currently doesn’t work with OSM data, I don’t see much reason for it to right now.

So the output is a .osm file which effectively just contains markers? For example, if I add numbers for three houses in the app, I’ll have to add those numbers to the houses again in JOSM?

Hi,

This looks like a promising way for improving address coverage in OpenStreetMap. I’d probably lean towards “Address Mapper” or similar as the name. (I’m not sure about the “Housemapper” suggestion since the app presumably isn’t limited to just houses.)

I have a few other comments:

• The address prediction logic in Vespucci works reasonably well. Have you looked at that?
• Please support switching to a keyboard so that house names can be entered too.
• You mention you want to add direct upload to OpenStreetMap. What happens with the data now? Also, I’m unclear if this is just adding markers, or actually changing OSM data directly. (Sorry if I’ve missed something.)
• For imagery, can you use Editor Layer Index?
• It would be great if the app could also support splitting buildings (like Terracer, and also splitting on arbitrary points, and at half way along one not necessarily straight edge).

Thanks :)

It’s not really an algorithm for detecting mismatched addr:street–it’s just a visualisation tool. Detecting the mismatches is left up to users for exactly the sort of reasons you mention: sometimes a property might appear to be on a particular road but is accessed from a different road. There are so many edge cases with addressing.

Great work! I never tire of seeing improvements to the map like this.

Recently I discovered the JOSM Coloured Streets style. This is really useful for address mapping. I wish I’d discovered it earlier. It shows streets, buildings, and address nodes on the same street in the same colour. This makes it easy to spot buildings tagged with the wrong addr:street at a glance. It also clearly shows buildings with addr:housenumber or addr:housename (you must enable the latter in the settings) but no addr:street. I know the JOSM validator does this check too, but with Coloured Streets you can see the problem immediately.

Since I’m probably not explaining it well, this screenshot should help:

Ashcombe House, Outwoods, and Beechwood are in pink and therefore have an addr:street of Stanley Road, when they should be on Ashley Road. The mistake would not be obvious otherwise.

As with any other JOSM style, it’s easy to toggle on and off, or to temporarily hide by switching to wireframe mode if the colours become overwhelming or distracting.

@Richard: thanks for the correction. I’m glad to be wrong in this case :)

I share your enthusiasm for improving UK address coverage, but alas I don’t think these maps can be used. The maps themselves are out of copyright, but the company who digitised them seems to assert copyright over the images.

Great work! I never tire of seeing such progress on the map, and it’s all the more inspiring when it’s from a new mapper.

When I started mapping, I often wasn’t sure how to map things. I’ve found chatting to other mappers on IRC (particularly in #osm-gb) very helpful. There are some very experienced mappers in that channel.

Specifically for terraces, I think it’s better to have each house within a terrace mapped separately. For rectangular-shaped buildings, it’s quick and easy to do this with JOSM’s Terracer plugin. Adding addresses can be fiddly when the terrace name differs from the street name (see SK53’s interesting article about this), but this isn’t OpenStreetMap’s fault. Our world is complicated and messy, and if OpenStreetMap is to accurately reflect it, some complexity is unavoidable.

Please keep up the good mapping!

Hi John,

Great work! I’ve had a look around Sheffield on the map and I see lots of your work.

I spent a long time adding public rights of way around Cheltenham, though not quite as systematically or rigorously as you. The sheer number and total length of rights of way in England never ceases to amaze me. In Gloucestershire alone, the total length is longer than the entire coastline of England.

It would be good if you could add the prow_ref tag. Robert Whittaker’s excellent site has more details about local authorities which have released details of their rights of way as open data. Map The Paths is useful too.

For anyone else reading this, a few years ago I published an article about mapping Britain’s paths in OpenStreetMap.

Nick

Excellent work. I’ll probably never walk this trail (or even a significant part of it) but it makes me happy to see so many hiking trails being added to OpenStreetMap :)

I’m a little late to the discussion, but trees.sg is an excellent example of government tree data (from Singapore). There are details (girth, height, crown diameter, scientific name, common name, …) for around 529,000 trees.

Good work–it’s great to see this level of detail on the map.

On this point:

In towns, or cities, with streets that are numbered sequentially, with odd numbers on the left, and even numbers on the right, this is not a problem.

There are many streets where that is the case, but the more addresses I add to map, the more unusual cases I find. Here are just a few recent examples (without even looking at the classic “Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses” article):

• Numbering on one side of the street jumps from 3 to 13.
• Subdivsion–numbers like 24a and 24b are quite common, but I recently saw a street with houses from 24a to 24g.
• Houses with an address on one street, but their entrance on a different street.
• A block of flats where most flats use a communal entrance, but where some flats on the first floor have their own external staircase.
• Some cul-de-sacs numbered anti-clockwise.
• A single “logical” road having two or more different names, with different numbering schemes. (See Charlton Lane and Greenhills Road.)
• A road with a named terrace block, so you can have (say) number 18 in that terrace almost opposite a different number 18 on the same street.

As such, I think it’s useful to add all addresses to the map, even “obvious” ones.

Very disappointing. The all-seeing Facebook gains yet more control.

I propose that we all thank Mapillary for the service these past years and find somewhere else to put our photos.

I dislike Facebook and don’t use it, so this was my initial reaction too.

But thinking about it more, Facebook (like anyone else) was already able to use Mapillary images to improve OpenStreetMap before the acquisition. Also, if I’m not mistaken, there was nothing to stop Facebook paying Mapillary to use the images for other purposes, in the same that way HERE did for example. At the time, that made me a little uneasy, but Mapillary had to fund itself somehow (storage and salaries aren’t cheap).

Still, Facebook’s involvement makes me a little uncomfortable.

Great work :) It’s good to see so many buildings and addresses being added. I’ve been doing similar here in Cheltenham and have discovered interesting paths and places in the process.

Great work! I like looking at airports on OpenStreetMap when travelling. Some (such as Munich) are mapped to incredible detail :) Keep up the good work!

Thanks a lot for these improvements. I’ve been using the tool for several months, as it’s useful to see what’s going on in an area. It has helped me identify vandalism too.

Being able to select a time range is useful too. Please keep up the good work :)

I suspect HDYC uses this daily feed of changes in osmChange format: http://planet.openstreetmap.org/replication/day/000/001/

I’m inclined to agree with the others who commented: I think your time could probably be better spent improving the map. For me, knowing that I’m positively contributing to a hugely useful resource is motivation enough. I’ve explored so many places thanks to OpenStreetMap and OsmAnd.

On the other hand, motivation is very individual, so if you need hard numbers to keep you going, then so be it :)

Thanks for all your contributions to OpenStreetMap–you’ve got many more than me!

On the subject of Best Western, could someone with clout contact them and suggest that they follow the good example of fellow hotel chain Hilton and manage their own OpenStreetMap presence? Both Best Western and their customers would benefit :)