One of the biggest challenges with mapping house numbers is simply getting to that street to begin with. It takes a volunteer making an effort to go to various parts of town that he/she doedn't normally go to, since most neighbourhoods don't have their own local mappers interested in adding house numbers.
Once someone has made that effort, then it isn't too much extra effort to do all the house numbers. So, no need to restrict oneself to the middle of the range.
OSMAnd's address search feature already allows you to choose from among the house numbers that do exist for a street, even if the whole street isn't mapped, so it is often easy to navigate to the general ballpark of your destination.
I wonder if OSMand could take advantage of having a few street numbers. Right now, in the "address search" mode, if the number you're looking for doesn't exist, you're out of luck. But theoretically it could accept any street number, and if a street even has a few numbers in place (I often find random street numbers probably entered by residents or shopowners) it could at least tell you "it's somewhere between here and there". Even that would be vastly more useful.
Then mapped crusaders like yourself could first focus on adding numbers in the middle of streets, and then gradually, in binary search fashion, continuing to halve unnumbered street sections.
There is Open Street Map (or Wikipedia for that matter). A large enough army of volunteers could produce or tag a dataset that rivals Google's data, but it would be a lot of work.
I'm a novice contributor, primarily using StreetComplete and the online editor. From some of what I've read, they've been burned by some imports in the past and are gunshy with mass imports.
> Why are we still drawing house by house when many cities offer this data freely?
It's not perfect, but there are some AI assistants which make this less tedious.
The free maxminddb geolite2 does fine for most cases, too. Nice and easy-to-use python module to go with it. I'm pretty sure the city one is ~100MB, so doable to keep a copy on-device.
I'd love to see more of the sort of information for other cities, seems like it could be brought together in some sort of wiki or OSM-based system to allow crowd-sourced data.
Yes, adding city names would be interesting. But it would also add tons of extra info to the file. Some countries have hundreds or even thousands of counts for a single name only.
This is really nice, though the documentation is a bit lacking in parts (there's already a pull request to make things a bit nicer :)
For example, I can see a station is missing, but is there any way to find its UIC code (or other identifiers) so I can add an entry? It's not clear what `is_suggestable` actually means, so I wouldn't know what to input.
Also, while there are info:* columns for miscellaneous info, there doesn't seem to be multiple name:* columns for the localised station name (a lot of this data may already be in OpenStreetMap)?
Been planning on making an app that does this based on current location. The government in South Australia lists source information like this along with almost every named street, suburb, etc. Should be standard worldwide IMO.
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