Last week Austria released nationwide address point data under an open license. By the end of the day we had added it to OpenAddresses.io. Since then we’ve loaded and tested the data, and today it went live in the Mapbox geocoder.
Our geocoder already delivered great results in Austria. But this dataset improves our accuracy even further, delivering rooftop-level precision for more than two million addresses. You can see the difference in the before and after shots below. The blue markers are addresses with known locations from our test dataset. The green markers are results from our geocoder. In many cases, the geocoder results are now more precise than the test data.
We’re able to use this data to improve our geocoder because of the Austrian government’s choice of an attribution-based open data license. This style of license offers much more freedom to end users than share-alike licenses.
Thanks to the new Austrian data, a national dataset from Estonia and new U.S. data, OpenAddresses gained nearly 10 million points last a week. The project now contains over 140 million addresses from around the world, and is by far the largest open address dataset in the world. But we can always use help finding more data.
Know of a dataset? Live in a country missing from OpenAddresses? Open a ticket or send an email.
Photo by Alex Holzknecht