Hello everyone,
The SIAMU (fire brigade and of urgent medical aid of the Brussels Region)
presently uses OpenStreetMap in several of its applications, in particular to
define preferential routes for emergency vehicles in Brussels. We work at the
moment with Champs Libres to ensure a regular and effective integration of OSM
updates in our internal applications.
One of the problems we run into is related to street names. The SIAMU have its
own dictionary of street names which we have associated with OSM road network
using the 'name' tag. But we have some difficulties in maintaining this link
throughout the updates.
All things considered, the best solution for us would be to add some reference
identifier to every OSM highway in Brussels. That would allow us to maintain
the link with our internal street dictionary, even when the tag 'name' is
modified.
There are several possibilities for a reference id. We suggest choosing the
national register number for public road network (made of the zip code + a road
number). This code would have the advantage to be also usable outside Brussels
Region. Moreover, anyone who wants to make the link between OSM and any
administrative data containing this national register number could re-use it.
We would like to ask for advice to the OSM community on several questions:
- Do you think that a new tag 'ref:natreg' could be used?
- In certain cases, several numbers of national register are associated to the
street (when the street follows or crosses one or several municipal limits). In
this case, it is preferable to use several tags or to use a single tag with a
separator (";") between the different reference numbers?
- Do you think that an automatic import of these national register numbers for
Brussels Road network could be realized?
Of course, we also plan to contribute to improve OSM objects used by the
emergency services. A wikipage could be created listing all the tags that we
consider important for our applications. We see a real added-value in using OSM
in our applications (especially in term of data updates) and we hope for a
fruitful collaboration!
Nadia Poncelet (for SIAMU)
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