OpenStreetMap
Back in the UK and navigating by OSM on my old 60 CSX, I tried to find a restaurant on West Street. No dice. Seems that the extract assumes that all directions should be modifiers of street names, so poor old West Street becomes W Street, if anything at all.
Discussion
Comment from Warin61 on 22 December 2015 at 06:11
1) West Street. I ‘see’ nothing wrong with West Street in the data base (using JOSM). The name tag is correctly entered.
There are no addresses on west street … no POI with that street address information ..
2) Restaurants I see 2 in close proximity to West Street … but neither of them has a street nor a house number tagged on their node.
I would hope that once the 60Csx is located around west street a POI search for restaurants would give you the 2 ones there .. among any others. One Persian, the other Curry.
Comment from scruss on 22 December 2015 at 10:08
It’s in the OpenMapChest garmin extract that gives the location as “W ST”. It’s fine in the database, but is clearly being munged by the conversion script.
If you look at the changeset that included those restos, you may find a familiar user name … I don’t have a reliable free source of address data for the UK, so I didn’t add them. Slightly surprised that there aren’t even address ranges for these locations. I was under the impression that the UK was pretty sorted for mappers and Ontario was a bit crap, but if you can’t even find a decent curry using OSM …
Village Curry House is very good, btw.
Comment from SK53 on 22 December 2015 at 12:33
If you use a North America-based Garmin extract this may well happen!
I doubt it this applies to the most widely used UK-based extract (that by Talky Toaster).
UK addresses are a well-understood issue: they require diligent on-the-ground surveying. To say this is not everyone’s cup of tea, would be an understatement. The main result of an open address initiative was to place under suspicion our biggest potential source of open address data: so whereas 18 months ago it looked like a lot of basic data could be developed semi-automatically, we’re back to where we were before.
For several years I have been advocating using the Food Hygiene Open Data to add address data to already mapped POIs as a way of bootstrapping post codes and addresses.
Comment from scruss on 23 December 2015 at 10:23
I used Talky Toaster’s exports a couple of years ago. They had their own shortcomings, not least their routing being very weak (though very scenic).
Shame about the address source problems. I usually map addresses from my own street surveys. Food hygiene open data is a good source, and we’re looking at that in Toronto for OSM — though Canada jealously guards the copyright of its postal code data, so we have to look elsewhere for that.