Physical Addressing data from OSM?

Happy New Year All,
New to the QGIS/OSM world forgive me if I do anything wrong in my post.

We are a small Telco Engineering firm, we specialize in fiber to the home design. We recently switched over our design work to QGIS using OSM.

We have been trying OSM plugin ins like OSM Downloader, OSM Info and Quick OSM.

We currently are working in markets in Georgia, Florida and NYS.

Our clients define a boundary and we go survey all the poles and distribution networks and propose a design in QGIS with the field data mapped in. One of the most important parts of the design is sizing of the fiber. So counting the addresses is important. Also distinguishing residential from commercial is important.

So the question is, is there a way through QGIS to extract the address data associated with a polygon?

Right now we create a polygon that represents the boundary for the area in question.

I use OSM Downloader to create a new shape layer with the building polygons and create ones that are missing. But no physical address data I’m finding with the shapes.

I’ve been trying to use OSM Info, which gives me the data I’m looking for but I can’t seem to find a way to convert the data to shape file as points so I can map the data and see what is or is not in my boundary.

Hope I made sense.

Thanks all

Please forgive if I used the incorrect terminology.

OSM is only one of the many databases available. You have to recognize its data is not going to be complete everywhere, due to license restrictions, and effort required for users to import such compatible datasets. The advantage it provides, when government open data is free these days, include accessibility and a common data format.

Using QGIS is already good enough to support open software. You will need to get building and address data from those states to process them. Don’t forget you can use a mix of sources if needed, in particular roads from OSM; and rendered background tiles ranging from the default base map you see in QGIS, to OSM-based providers eg Mapbox.

As has already been said, the data may not be in OSM. You may be able to supplement addresess for instance with data from openaddresses.io (much of which is encumbered with licences which mean it cannot be used in OSM. Buildings not on OSM may be available from the Bing/MS building open data (which can be imported easily into OSM using the RapID edtor). I guess precise details are less important than decent counts of features in your target areas. If nothing else comparing OSM with these external sources can provide a rough metric of how much you should trust OSM.

In many cases a bit of light editing in OSM could improve the data directly for your projects & make it available for others (for instance adding or refining residential & commericial landuse). I think landuse in Georgia was imported long ago and may be rather ‘broad-brush’.

Some parts of NY state have complete addresses in OSM (Syracuse & elsewhere in Onondaga Co). You can check base level coverage of buildings & addresses with Simon Poole’s QA layers, for instance this link shows Florida, red are buildings without addresses, green addresses (buildings or not).

You may also be interested in openinframap.org which visualises various types of infrastructure mapped in OSM, although we tend to focus on power and other energy related infra rather than telecom.

Oops forgot to mention OpenAddresses here, when I did in another discussion.

Depending on your unit of measurement, Microsoft AI buildings are all building=yesshapes only without the exact category. You will need to rely on land-use data elsewhere.

Maybe adding land parcel and dwelling data could help on top of the usual addresses, land utilization, and zoning data. The latter may not necessarily give you an individual household / “functional unit”. (Outsider thought to give you some ideas)

I think this is one of the challenges placekey.io tries to solve. Go there, and see the details - but here it is in a nutshell.

  • Placekey uses hexagons, not the usual x.y pairs or rectangular grids
  • The addresses are predictable much the same way Plus Codes are
  • They COULD use elevation data. I guess this part of your research

In Florida you should have the full benefit of the system, please let us know how it goes for you!
Laying fiber to the home, your core business, is the Holy Grail of local data-centers, the next logical step from the so-called Web2 to Web3, for Industry 4.0, for decentralized Layer 1,2,3 - we all want you to succeed.

I am going to do my best to advocate here at OMS for placekey.io-like thinking.