Import/Clark County, Washington Addresses
This is a plan for the addition of address point data for the Clark County, Washington. This effort builds on successful import projects completed last year and more recent assisted mapping projects in which buildings data has been prepared for mappers to add to OpenStreetMap via OSM editors (see Data Updates section below). For a list of other Esri-curated datasets that are available for mapping, please see Esri ArcGIS Datasets.
Goals
The goal of this effort is to add the Clark County, Washington address data to effectively complete the coverage of address data for the County, using authoritative data from the County. OSM currently has a more limited set of detailed addresses (including house and unit numbers) in the County. This effort would greatly enhance the coverage of detailed addresses for the County, while retaining the many addresses already added to OSM.
The goal would be to only add separate address points where the addresses are (a) not already included in OSM as nodes (e.g. amenities) and (b) not associated with existing buildings that are available in OSM, unless the address points add more tags (e.g. multiple units within a single apartment building that has a street address). There is more detail on this in the Data Preparation section below.
Schedule
Data preparation was completed in March 2022. The edits to OSM would be performed incrementally by OSM mappers over the remainder of 2022 and beyond, starting after data is reviewed by the OSM community.
Source
Data was downloaded from the ArcGIS Hub Open Data site and preparation was completed in March 2022.
The processed address points that could be added to OSM are available to access on ArcGIS Online (see Clark County, WA Addresses). You can Open in Map Viewer to preview (click features to view tags) or sign in to export data for offline use.
OSM ODbL Compliance: Yes, the Clark County data is provided under an open data license with explicit permission provided by Clark County to use in OpenStreetMap.
Data Preparation
The processed address points referenced above were created using these Esri Data Processing Steps for Buildings and Addresses, developed and refined while doing data prep for several city and county communities in the United States. Below are a couple notes specific to the Clark County addresses data.
- The processed data contains 226,053 total address points.
- The processed data includes address tags (i.e. housenumber, street, unit, city, postcode).
Data Conflation
Existing address features in OSM will not be replaced. The plan is to perform the updates in phases. In the first phase, only new address points that do not conflict with existing address points, or duplicate addresses that are being added to buildings, will be added. If the address is already associated with a building footprint (e.g. house) that is in OSM or available separately to add to OSM, then the address point will not be added separately. However, if the address point will provide additional detail for a building footprint (e.g. apartment building), such as a unit number, then it will be added separately. In future phases, existing OSM buildings that do not have complete addresses may be updated to include additional address tags.
Data Updates
The plan is to perform the initial phase of updates using a updated version of RapiD and an updated Map with AI plugin for JOSM (see Esri blog post on new tools in OSM editors for more detail). The new tools will enable OSM mappers to access ArcGIS Datasets hosted in ArcGIS Online and select individual features to use while editing OSM. The mapper will be able to select a feature, review and edit the feature geometry and available fields, and then save their edits.
The mapper will have the benefit of using existing features that have been created by the data provider, along with their available field values that have been pre-processed by Esri, while also being able to compare that feature with existing OSM data (e.g. street names) and imagery to ensure it is accurate and consistent. The data source used for the edit will be added as a tag to each feature that is saved as part of a changeset.
Accounts
The plan is for most OSM mappers to use their standard OSM accounts if they are editing with RapiD and JOSM editors for OSM and editing individual features. However, if Esri staff were to do any 'bulk' edits where we do not examine individual features, then we will create and use new dedicated import accounts (e.g. <username>_siouxfalls_import) for those changesets. We encourage other OSM mappers to do the same.