This write up was originally planned for our Data Portal. I felt this would be best posted here for now. This once small project is said to inspire future plans for the National Address Database, and I’m sure our County can borrow a few ideas here. Brainstorm, anyone?
The OpenAddresses project has become a phenomenon in recent months. What started as a simple spreadsheet listing government address datasets by a single OpenStreetMap contributor has exploded into a storehouse containing 300 million addresses regularly collected from over 1,600 official sources around the world. Using automated processes, the site regularly downloads files and formats fields into a uniform table structure.
The site is powered by GitHub, and setting up a request to add or update your city’s or county’s data source is remarkably simple. (I used my GitHub account to direct them to our official CAMS source a few months ago.)
Please note that the site’s growing pains might cause regional downloads to take a while. Downloading a single county or city at a time may be more practical. Downloads include VRT files for converting CSV files to a GIS data format of your choice via ogr2ogr, a handy command-line geoprocessing tool.
To learn more about this project, this FOSS4G/NA presentation given by founder Ian Dees was released on YouTube.