Our underpaid team of data wranglers have been working diligently over the last six months to develop and bring forward our proposal for importing addresses statewide into Massachusetts. This has been no easy process, and has many specific concerns which we’ve been working hard to address over the last six months of development for this plan. We have come up with a multiple phase-based import approach which we believe mitigates data issues while providing high quality data to be imported, sought feedback from our local community, and have now submitted our request for comments to the national imports@ list for further discussion before starting the import process.

As a background, we discovered MassGIS data on address parcels available through the 911 data within the state. The raw data consists of points which are located on top of the building centroids, as far as the state is concerned where the buildings are. For multiple building properties, the address point is located in the center of that property. This is workable, but means the data has to be filtered between the two import phases to fix the correlation between the two types of nodes.

This marks a significant milestone within our local community’s mapping development. Importing addresses to every building in Massachusetts is no small task, but the effect on data quality and usability of OpenStreetMap will be significant. The wiki link for our import proposal can be found here: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Catalogue/MassGIS_Addresses

You are invited to provide feedback on our process on imports@. If you’d like to contribute, we need data wranglers and coders. Feel free to reach out on talk-us-massachusetts or #massachusetts on the OSM US Slack.