[mkgmap-dev] House numbers supported?

Sun Dec 20 22:38:57 GMT 2009

On Dec 20, 2009, at 9:08, Marko Mäkelä wrote:

> I do not really know anything about this.  My not-so-well-educated
> guess is that the house numbers could show up if you ran mkgmap --index
> and uploaded the map to the device from MapSource.  I have never tried
> either.

I am fairly certain that the --index option does not (yet) include house numbers. As far as I know there are two significant problems preventing this: 1) the Garmin house number format still needs to be reverse engineered, and 2) some kind of mapping would have to be devised to translate the various OSM address schemes to the Garmin format. Both are non-trivial, I would think.

Individual POIs can have address data, but this is separate from the --index option and the address search. The POI address data are simply displayed when you choose the detail of that POI; the address appears to have no other function. (Except, as I understand, that certain GPS units can trigger the dialing of  telephone numbers included in the address.)

- Also be aware that not all POI types can hold address data. Shopping and other institutions can generally have address data, but other natural and man-made items cannot.

As a workaround for the missing house numbers in the index, you can get some house numbers to be displayed on the map, if you add the numbers to the names of items in the points and polygons style files.

I have the following at the bottom of my polygons file:

 addr:housenumber=* & name=* {name '${name} (${addr:housenumber})'}
 addr:housenumber=* & addr:housename=* {name '${addr:housename} ${addr:housenumber}'}
 addr:housename=* & name!=* {name '${addr:housename}'}
 addr:housenumber=* {name '${addr:housenumber}'}

This will append the house number (or name) in parenthesis to the name of the polygon, if it has one. If the polygon has no name, the house number is used as the name. The effect is much like the house numbers which appear in the Slippy Map.

I have attached a screen shot of a section of Hamburg which shows how this looks. Note that the two POIs (Hotel Hafentor and Gustaf-Adolf-Kyrkan) have house numbers because they were generated from polygons with the --add-pois-to-areas option; I have no address lines in the points file.

Going back to the index topic, if you want to see a good example of a map that has house number information, take a look at the New Zealand Open GPS map:

  http://nzopengps.org/

Their map does not use OSM data and uses cGPSmapper, so it is of little relevance to this project, but it does give a good idea of how a map with proper street number indexing should function.

Cheers.

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