Import/United States Addresses

This is a plan for the addition of address point data for selected states in the United States. This effort builds on successful import projects completed last year and more recent assisted mapping projects in which address 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 much more address data for the United States, using authoritative data from various states and local governments in the United States that has been assembled by the U.S. Department of Transportation in the National Address Database. This effort would greatly enhance the coverage of address data for the United States. The data could be added as tags on existing or new building features or as separate address points, as appropriate.

Schedule

Data preparation was completed in March 2021. The edits to OSM would be performed incrementally by OSM mappers over the remainder of 2021 and beyond, starting after data is reviewed by the OSM community.

Source

The source address points were downloaded in January 2021 from the U.S. Department of Transportation National Address Database website.

The processed address points that can be added to OSM are available to access on ArcGIS Online (see United States Addresses (NAD)). 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 data is public domain data (snapshot) provided by the U.S. Government.

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 United States Addresses (NAD) data.

• The processed data contains 53,502,433 address points, most of which do not already existing as addresses in OSM.
• The data includes several address (addr) keys (e.g. housenumber, street, unit, city, state, postcode) that have been prepared to be added as tags in OSM.

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 updates using a new 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 enable OSM mappers to access ArcGIS Datasets hosted in ArcGIS Online and select individual features to use while editing OSM. The mapper is able to select a feature, review and edit the feature geometry and available fields, and then save their edits.

The mapper has 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 unless deleted by mapper.

Accounts

The plan is for 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 OSM mappers wish to do any 'bulk' edits or imports where they do not examine individual features, then they should create and use new dedicated import accounts (e.g. <username>_<community>_import) for those changesets.