In 2011 the then current board had a face to face meeting in Seattle and produced a set of “audacious goals” for OSM that were

• The World’s Most Used Map
• More Than Just Streets
• Cultivating Leadership of Mappers
• Easier Contribution for Non-Geeks

Now some of these would have been directly actionable, but the first two are really “visions” under a different name. And as visions goes they are quite good, far out goal posts that nobody expects to be achieved soon.

And we are still far away from reaching the first goal . There are lots of pieces missing before we can remotely hope to achieve it, but we are on the way.

Steve has long harped about adding more addresses to OSM, matter of fact I have too. From a pure usability point of view if you want to produce a competitive device or app with door to door navigation support you are going to need address data. To be more precise this boils down to adding hose/building numbers with their associated streets (intentional pun) to our dataset in some form.

Note on the side: there are lots of regions that don’t have a conventional western way of describing locations, we don’t have good support for that yet in OSM, solving the “address problem” tends to centred around 1st world countries.

The OSM community has lots of experience with adding addresses by both on the ground surveying and imports of suitable open data, matter of fact we’ve had a full country “complete” for half a decade now. What is however undeniable is that it is slow progress, even importing a couple of million addresses (we don’t have good numbers, but it is likely that there is something between half and one billion address conventional house addresses out there) takes a lot of time if you want to provide some minimum quality and the preferable on the ground surveying tends to be even slower.

But we are making progress and looking at one of the larger countries, Germany, with 81 million population, we are now at roughly 1/3 coverage with a combination of on the ground survey supported by open data and smaller imports, completion likely in 2 years at the current rate.

There are some places where we don’t have a good handle on the issue, for example in the “original OSM country”, the UK, due to the addressing system revolving mainly around non-surveyable proprietary schemes and house numbers playing a secondary role. But we are not the only group feeling the pain there and I’m optimistic that we will find a way out, and if it is simply by replacing such proprietary systems.

To summarize: addresses are important and yes it is something that the community is working on with dedication. There is really nothing visionary about it at all at this point in time, not more than “lets map all roads in Germany”.

Hammers

Steve has a legitimate commercial itch that he wants scratched and he wants that fast. This is not unique, readers following the “imports” mailing list have seen similar requests from HOT, matter of fact one of the HOT requests had that other problematic attribute “non-editable”.

Luckily HOT hasn’t tried to stage a coup d’état to get their way. But what it does tell us is that the OSM data format, its tool chains, its editors and other applications have become extremely popular and people prefer our tools over others. It is a great testimonial to OSM.

OSM was built around the notion of mappers collecting or curating data and then adding it to our central repository, iteratively improving the quality and completeness over time. “fast” and “non-editable” are the antithesis to what normal OSM is about.

Now I’m sure ESRI doesn’t get many complaints about them not providing the ultimate multi-100 GB all free geo-data of the world shape file that includes everything, so why do we? I can only guess that it is because people are feeling left out and think that if their favourite dataset is not included that they are not part of this great community.

But, really, it is just a superficial marketing and packaging issue.

If Steve or better his employer want to create the

ultimate_free_address_superpack_US_edition.osm

containing a quickly thrown together conversion of all the open data address sets in the US, great, the OSMF might even be convinced to distribute it in the same place as the planet dumps. And we have more than enough id space to support conflict free merging.

There is simply no need to compromise the normal OSM community process for a short term gain.

We don’t only have hammers, please stop just seeing nails.