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OSM Inspector Address View now world-wide

11.04.2014 | Frederik Ramm

For over 5 years now, Geofabrik’s OSM Inspector is an important quality assurance tool for OpenStreetMap, used by thousands of mappers on a daily basis to check their local area or their own work.

Some of the Inspector’s layers, like for example the routing problem analysis or the broken multipolygon view, have already been available world-wide for a while; but others were restricted to Europe because of limited resources.

Today we announce the launch of a world-wide address layer, highlighting mistyped addresses, addresses without matching roads, bad interpolation ranges, and other common problems with addresses in OpenStreetMap. The new view is available from the standard view select drop-down in OSM Inspector, replacing the previous Europe-only layer.

This view was previously computed by a relatively slow process based on a PostGIS backend, and now uses a completely new standalone backend that is based on Jochen Topf’s new Osmium library, and available on GitHub.

This launch is made possible by a generous hardware sponsorship from Canadian telematics company Geotab Inc. – thank you!

We’d also like to thank Lukas Toggenburger, who developed the new OSMI address backend as part of a project thesis for his master studies at HTW Chur, in Switzerland, in a cooperation with HSR Rapperswil.