cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/22847797
Osmand doesn’t appear to be able to locate street addresses. Like if I input something like “123 4th Street” all it can do is offer some cross streets, which may be miles away from my intended location.
Is there a way to augment it’s data so street addresses work? Maybe there’s a service I can add?
Similarly, it doesn’t know the names of many businesses.
You can check on openstreetmap.org whether the data is on OSM at all. If it isn’t, you can add it yourself, there are many ways to edit OSM and tutorials where you can learn it. The specific documentation for address keys is here: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:addr:*
In general, OsmAnd definitely does support searching for house numbers if they are correctly mapped in OSM. I’ve done it many times and tried it out just now too. So if it can’t find any house numbers in the area you’re looking at, that probably means they are just not on the map yet. OSM is and will always be a work in progress.
Why are people manually inputting addresses instead of periodically updating with something like the national-address-database.
In some places that can be, has been, or is done, in others not, for various reasons including license compatibility, data quality, maintainability (how do you reliably detect whether a data point is already there), etc. There is plenty of information about imports and other automated edits and the rules surrounding them on the OSM wiki.
@pr06lefs @schnurrito @openstreetmap
Because not everyone lives somewhere where open data exists. Even that map of a single country shows that
~40%(?) of the country is missing the relevant data.
And the license maybe not compatible in some states:
People are working on it https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/United_States_Addresses