National rules and prectices for mapping addresses in Finland

Dear Finnish OSM community,
first of all, sorry to write you in English. I’m an OSM mapper from Italy, doing some research on combining crowd-sourced and authoritative information in Europe and working on a use case with addresses data in Finland. This is mainly because the National Land Survey (NLS) of Finland has a very good service providing INSPIRE-harmonised data on addresses using OGC API Features.
Looking at the OSM data on addresses in Finland, I see that the addr:* tags are added sometimes to isolated nodes inside the building footprint, sometimes as nodes (e.g. with entrance tag) on the border of a building, sometimes as an additional tag to a building-way, sometime added to nodes describing POIs (amenity, shop, …). These different approaches are common everywhere, but I was wondering whether the Finland community has some national rules/practices for a suggested/preferred way to map addresses. I don’t see any specific information of the wiki page https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Addresses, so I’m asking you here some advice.
I’ve tried to look into some topics in the forum, searching for the term osoitteet, but it is really difficult for me to find information. I would be very grateful if you could point me to relevant topics in the forum or web pages elsewhere were this issue has been maybe already discussed.
Looking from the other side, the NLS data on addresses are represented as points inside the building footprint: is this the official rule in Finland for mapping addresses? Could you point me to some official documentation?
In addition to that, I was also looking if there have been big imports related to addresses and, looking at the import catalogue https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Catalogue, I can only see this import for the region of Helsinki: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Helsinki_region_building_import
Is this the only one happened in Finland or there are maybe others around?
And finally, are there any coordinated efforts to improve in OSM the addresses data in Finland, maybe asking the permission to NLS to import their data into OSM?
Thank you very much in advance for reading this and for any input.
Hyvää päivänjatkoa,
Ale

From what i know, i just mark tags like:
addr:housenumber
and
addr:street.

Thank you Petsamo.
Could you please add where do you place these tags? To a node inside/on the border of the building, or to the building way itself? Is there anything written or any internal agreement on how to deal with the placement of these tags?

Hello!

I don’t believe (do please correct me if I’m wrong) that there’s anything written that has in some way been officially agreed on. Of course there are some local versions of the tag wiki pages like Key:addr, but as I see it they give you full freedom to use either nodes or ways. Nothing mentioned either on our project Finland pages in the wiki.

Personally I prefer tagging the address to buildings whenever possible. The only exceptions to this rule I accept is when there isn’t a building eg. when a building permit has been granted and an address to the place issued or when there are points of interest within a building that you want to create addresses for or when there are multiple addresses within a building.

In these “multiple address” cases I would however prefer using entrance tagging to indicate the different address locations in greater detail in relation to the building itself. Entrances are also the main reason for my tagging addresses to buildings because our national (digitransit) journey planners could then use the possible added entrance nodes as reference point for certain addresses instead of the building footprint.

As I said these are my own opinions that I’ve developed while working with OpenStreetMap as a GIS specialist at Helsinki Region Transport. One of the organisations producing these journey planners I mentioned.

We at HSL have documented what we do with OSM here and some of our views on how to update OSM to serve digitransit based journey planner purposes optimally (might need updating for some parts) here.

About official data sets. National Land Survey data has been granted the permission to be included into OSM but that wouldn’t maybe be the optimal data source for the nationwide address data as we have this data set available. I don’t believe this dataset has however been issued a permission to be included into OSM. So far there has only been some smaller import projects round the subject of addresses mainly in the Helsinki region as you referred to. That particular import has been conducted for parts 1 and 2 (Vantaa & Espoo) but part 3 (Helsinki) was as I believe never done. The source data for these imports came from the municipalities.

Greetings Markku Huotari aka houtari or HSL_HRT

Houtari said it quite well.
The priority is part of the building itself.