Hey guys, I know this question is probably answered somewhere on the internet but I just can’t seem to find it.
In OSM, I have an address, and on that block of land I have many separate small houses, each with the same house number, but different unit/flat numbers. I could assign housenumber 123 to each but from what I understand, duplicating information is bad.
Is it a good idea to instead omit this information from each house, and draw an area around the entire block with addr tags on that specifying housenumber, suburb, street etc. and each actual house only has unit number and building type?
Thanks guys
Hi,
Addresses can be really complicated. The full guide is on the wiki: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Addresses
Personally, I would open up JOSM, select all the buildings and slap
addr:streetandaddr:housenumber=123on them. However, I would addaddr:unit=XYZon every one of them (as @Krzyzwen@feddit.de pointed out as well).Next question: does every single house have their own letterbox? Or is there one location where all the letterboxes are located? Add a https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Dletter_box with
addr:streetandaddr:housenumberas well!I don’t think that adding an address to the plot of land is very useful (but a name of the project/area might be nice as well). Have a look at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:place for this,
place=plotorplace=city_blockmight be appropriate depending on the situation.Thanks for the reply! Regarding the letterbox,qt least a few of them had theirs in one of those walls with like 9 letterboxes in it so I’ll have to check again, but I’ll remember to add these from now on
Sorry another question, in a case where I’m just going by imagery and city council address number things, all Ill know is that all of those houses are units 1-8 or whatever, but now which is which… how would you do this?
addr:street and addr:housenumber to every object that reasonably has a unit number (so no sheds) for starters. There are a few possible configurations where you could reasonably interpolate unit numbers - eg. situated in a line, or side by side around a turning point - as long as you definitely know at least two. I don’t think anyone would hunt you down for interpolating precise numbers in reasonable to obvious cases, but if you want to be sure, there is addr:interpolation (see also https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:addr:*#Tags_for_interpolation_ways)
If you really have no clue, or reason to believe that the numbering are not regular, I’d leave a note on the site - or add a fixme tag - or both.
Awesome, thanks alot!!! I’m pretty new and have been mapping out my suburb so I’m just starting to get the hang of things like this
I would indeed add addr:housenumber= to each unit, there is also addr:unit= which I would prefer over constructions like “addr:housnumber=123/4”. Drawing a polygon around the lot for the housenumber sounds usable, for which I would use the residential that should already be there but, preferred method for that (afaik) is a singular address node.
There is probably a section in the wiki that describes, or at least proposes, a setup for precisely this use case.
addend: Another adjacent tag to addr:unit= would be ref=, though with buildings this also is often applied to buildings that already have differend housenumbers.
That isn’t really duplicating information. Duplicating information, would be for example, to have the outline of a building and a single node both with the same information representing the same shop.
In your case you have separate buildings that each happen to share some of the information. Put the full address information on each house. That way there is a clear connection between a single object and it’s data, and no additional computation is needed to collect all data to the object.
You can additionally have an area around the buildings with it’s full address, if they together represent a single entity.
