None OSM address data

[Cj-Malone]

I have seen #246 and I accept that through technical eyes, this is a duplicate of it, but through political eyes, this is very different.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

There is no authoritative Open Data addresses in the United Kingdom. Owen has been requesting address data from specific local authorities and is going a good job getting the data. Getting the data is only part of the battle, it being useful and known about is the next step. I believe once alternative, open address data is good enough the authoritative data will be released as Open Data. This is a political act, OSM was born doing this.

Describe the solution you'd like

I would like Nominatim to be able to read this data, and potentially make it available on nominatim.osm.org like alternate sources for postcode are.

Describe alternatives you've considered

These datasets are obviously better in OSM than out of OSM. We are working on adding them, but it's slow. Having this data used before the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement is renegotiated will be a massive factor on if we get authoritative Open Data in this decade.

Additional context

This data isn't perfect, it could do with cleaning. It has address levels/lines, that aren't immediately splitable into OSM tag. I have managed to assign addr:street to most of them here.

[lonvia]

Moving to discussion. It is essentially a duplicate of #246 technically and politically.

I'm not opposed to opening Nominatim to external datasets subjects to these two constraints:

• External datasets will not make it to nominatim.openstreetmap.org. The instance over there is first and foremost for mappers. Showing where there are still gaps in the OSM data is a feature, not a bug. The external UK postcodes are available on osm.org only for historical reasons. I wouldn't add them nowadays. If you need better address coverage on OSM, the fastest way is to organise a couple of mapping parties.
• Any changes for adding external data will have to be paid work. The main beneficiary for such a feature would be commercial entities that need complete address coverage, not the OSM community. All volunteer work for Nominatim goes into improving the software for mappers.

The licensing issues mentioned in #246 are still relevant. External data must either be completely mergeable with OSM data (probably meaning that the end result is ODbL) or Nominatim needs to get more fundamental structural changes that allow the OSM and external datasets to exist side-by-side. But that's more of an issue for whoever wants to use the feature. It's less an issue with a potential implementation.