Background

One major downside to fully using Open Street Map as a complete alternative to other map services (at least in the US) is the lack of address data. I strongly believe this is tied to the slow tedious process of adding addresses. I myself have spent many hours adding addresses a variety of methods beginning with driving by with a dash camera in my car and reviewing video feeds later. I then discovered the massGIS L3 parcel data overlay in JOSM and began

• Selecting all buildings in a town adding city, state, postcode to them
• Selecting the houses on a street , adding the street
• Going through the street to add the housenumbers
• And repeat for other streets uploading changes at the end of the day
• When I was done for each town, I would remove the city, state, and postcode from buildings that had no housenumber associated with them (I.E. garages or sheds on peoples properties that got captured in the first step).

While this last method was considerably faster, I still thought at a minimum there must be a way to add all these addresses to OSM as individual address nodes. After some research and a preliminary testing I was able to create a few scripts to convert the data into an osm file that could be opened with JOSM.

[UPDATE] As I was rightfully pointed to the import guidelines wiki, I am rewording this post as a proposed method and proof of concept to gather general thoughts before implementing.

High level overview

This section lists the high level overview of the process I would like to gather thoughts on. For more details see below

• Download the scripts L3ToOSM scripts
• Download MassGIS ESRI shapefile for the town
• Export shapefile database to csv
• Run script to convert to OSM importable file
• Import into JOSM for editing and merge address data with buildings
• Remove temprary address nodes
• Uploading to OSM
• Validation and error checking

Detailed Steps

… See full entry