Following on from last quarter's post-code and addresses project, I've been doing a bit more playing around with UK address data from OSM. I've put together a new report at http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/addresses/street-warnings/ which provides lists of potential issues in street names (e.g. addr:street=* values [1]) that appear in addresses on OSM objects [2].
In general, all the premises with the same postcode should have the same street name in their address [3]. The report flags cases where this isn't true, as well as potential anomalies in the street names (e.g. odd punctuation, abbreviations), and also cases where there is no street given. Key things it will help mappers detect are typos/inconsistencies in street names within addresses and typos/errors in addr:postcode values that put the wrong postcode on an object a few streets away from where it should be. The data should be updated roughly once a week. Please have a look if you're interested, and see if you find it useful in picking up mistakes. Also let me know if you've got any ideas/suggestions for improvements. Some technical notes: [1] Due to the way addresses are recorded in OSM, and the formatting of UK addresses by Royal Mail (see also [3] below), the "Street Name" for an object is picked up by the tool from a variety of tags. Currently it uses the following, in order of precedence: the addr:place tag, the addr:parentstreet tag, the addr:street tag, the name tag on associatedStreet relation if present, and the addr:locality tag [2] Since the tool uses data collected for analysing postcodes, it only considers objects with valid addr:postcode tags. [3] It's not quite true to say that a single postcode unit can only have addresses on a single street. First, there are a small number of historic anomalies where a single postcode unit does cover more than one street. Secondly, some addresses contain two street names, a main street and a so-called "dependent street". Apart from the historic anomalies, a single postcode should only cover one main street, but can include more than one dependent street. (The tool will not see the dependent streets as different if both streets are tagged, either as addr:substreet and addr:street or as addr:street and addr:parentstreet.) Finally, some addresses (e.g. in small hamlets) do not officially contain a street name and just have a house name and locality. So if the streets have names and these have been added to an OSM object, it may appear that a single postcode covers more than one street. (The tool will ignore different streets if addr:place is used for the common place/hamlet name.) Robert. -- Robert Whittaker _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb