Up until now the majority of my edits have been fixing major map issues in my local area. Adding roads, naming roads, relocating roads(!), some place updates and fixing auto-numbering issues within various houses estates.
So i understand that Waze should work in correctly navigating to an address, and if it doesn’t navigate to that address, a fix is needed. However, i never attempt to navigate directly to named houses, as i know this is virtually impossible by all maps (google maps included).Postcodes only, and then phone the customer! Most named houses are not on a named street, and addresses are in the format of Named House, Village, Postcode. However, this can often encompass several square miles in which the house may be located.
So it follows that named houses need imputing.
I do not believe my editing area is particularly large, (apparently 492square miles, although featuring the whole M4) but there must be thousands of named houses within this area due to the very rural location. Whilst this is quite an innocent looking segment, the properties to the north of the road are numbered, whilst the south houses are all named.
So the question that i’m asking is where do i start? Do i just pick a street and spend hours with GSV looking for house names? Is there a methodical way to do this? Does anyone have any advice about where i should begin?
Should i be adding these as residential point places, or just as house numbers/names? Quite a few of these will come under ‘Farm’ point places.
You have found yourself a big job and one we have been (and still are) working on to get Waze HQ to allow the use of house names in the number field of a residential place point. We had a small success last year when they allowed a letter with the number 12a, 124B, etc. Hopefully soon there may be some moves on actual names.
Anyway, in the meantime, we do add house names as normal place points with the category “Other”. This is also used for residential buildings with names that have several flats or apartments in the building.
As to where you find this, it must be from a copywrite free source, while we can use Google, OS and others to confirm a detail, we must not copy from these sources. (The Google streetview within the WME is one exception where we can use anything we can see there) There are Open Source maps and place listing around, you just have to find them. Unfortunately, I can’t recall anything with house names.
Farms are slightly different, first they have their own place category and second, there are several listing of farms in various directories and on the internet that you could use.
This is something I often found myself thinking about when I spent a few months driving for Tesco last year - some of the routes I used to cover are around the more rural parts of north-east Wales and west Cheshire, so there were a lot of houses with names but no numbers. I was just starting to get into editing back then, so doing something about it was a bit beyond where I was at at the time. I’ve seen a few such areas in WME (not around here, I should add) with, as Ian mentioned above, a load of ‘other’ place points to indicate properties with names. If I was still with Tesco now, that’s definitely something I’d look at doing as I came across appropriate areas.