cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/22847797
Osmand doesn’t appear to be able to locate street addresses. Like if I input something like “123 4th Street” all it can do is offer some cross streets, which may be miles away from my intended location.
Is there a way to augment it’s data so street addresses work? Maybe there’s a service I can add?
Similarly, it doesn’t know the names of many businesses.
You can check on openstreetmap.org whether the data is on OSM at all. If it isn’t, you can add it yourself, there are many ways to edit OSM and tutorials where you can learn it. The specific documentation for address keys is here: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:addr:*
In general, OsmAnd definitely does support searching for house numbers if they are correctly mapped in OSM. I’ve done it many times and tried it out just now too. So if it can’t find any house numbers in the area you’re looking at, that probably means they are just not on the map yet. OSM is and will always be a work in progress.
Why are people manually inputting addresses instead of periodically updating with something like the national-address-database.
@pr06lefs @schnurrito @openstreetmap
Because not everyone lives somewhere where open data exists. Even that map of a single country shows that
~40%(?) of the country is missing the relevant data.And the license maybe not compatible in some states:
Seven (7) Dark purple states may have data that is not in the public domain including: Hawaii, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Oregon, South Carolina, and South Dakota.
People are working on it https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/United_States_Addresses
In some places that can be, has been, or is done, in others not, for various reasons including license compatibility, data quality, maintainability (how do you reliably detect whether a data point is already there), etc. There is plenty of information about imports and other automated edits and the rules surrounding them on the OSM wiki.
That means the area where you’re looking hasn’t been mapped. You or somebody needs to add the street address and businesses.
You can add POIs with Osmand and lots of other software. Everydoor is straightforward for adding businesses.
Here is a street in my town that has house numbers
But one street over, no house numbers!
Nice!
Opportunity for you to map it ☺️
I’ll get to it. I can take that street when I walk home from work and do it. I already did 90% of my own street and it is the longest one in my town.
I wish it was more up front about not having address search capability. Its a waste of time for someone expecting to replace google maps, taking the time to install the app and then it turns out they can’t find anything.
OpenStreetMap is community-driven. Sometimes businesses are more up-to-date on OSM than GMaps, sometimes they just don’t exist. Someone would need to start mapping the area and maybe start a local group.
When I look up something and don’t find it, I add it. When I’m bored I use StreetComplete and EveryDoor and Vespucci to. If I go to a friend’s place, they get an address. My work place? They get a fence and a tree.
There is a local group where I live. They do meetups to map the things you wouldn’t think need mapping (electrical things, fire hydrants, etc.). The right volunteers can easily create a better map than GMaps… But someone needs to get the ball rolling.
I guess you’re heading back to GMaps, though.
yeah if I’m in my car and I need to go to a place
Than you just map it, and next time it will be on the map. On commercial map services it’s much harder to do this.
Oh I just map it without using gmaps? How’s that work?
You are not allowed to use Google Maps for this. Ther is copyright protection on it.
How does it work? You go there and note down the addresses.
You go there
lol
I prefer Organic Maps these days but I must admit that Magic Earth searches addresses quite well
The way i do it is use gps-coordinates.net and after getting gps coords i put those in osmand
