[okfn-za] South Africa Street Database

Sun Feb 12 13:36:32 UTC 2012

Hopefully I'm not going to bore this list with the results of my
findings so far.

I undertook a more focused search on the subject of a national address
database. It turns out that the de facto standard in South Africa is
the a database owned by AfriGIS (they're the company selling access
for R2 a pop - although they do have bulk discounts). This database is
used by everyone from municipalities, to banks to insurance companies.

see for example:

http://www.joburg.org.za/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3487&Itemid=197

There seems to be a move by a researcher at Pretoria University to
create an open grid for addresses:
http://www.cs.up.ac.za/cs/jbishop/Homepage/Pubs/Pubs2006/NADOnTheGrid-06.doc
http://www.cs.up.ac.za/cs/scoetzee/index.htm

She's also been involved in the development of a SANS standard for
addresses: http://www.cs.up.ac.za/cs/scoetzee/sans1883

Her one-pager on a national address database was written 6 years ago,
so hopefully there has been some progress since then. I'll try to
contact her tomorrow to ascertain the status of her project.

I have a feeling, deep in my gut, that this sort of database should
not be owned by a private corporation. I would love to take the first
steps toward opening it up but I expect that that all the big
consumers of this data are already using the existing commercial
database.

That just leaves the small guys out there without a solution.

As part of a scoping exercise, I have the following questions for this group:

1. Is there sufficient demand for this data to justify the collection
and maintenance of such a database?
2.  I can think of two main areas where this type of database might be useful:
  -  Validation of addresses
  -  Geocoding of addresses - i.e. improve OSM to go beyond street
names to include street numbers. That way I can get my GPS to route my
directly to my house rather than to the other end of my street.
  - This might be a great database for data-journalists and
researchers, especially for plotting valuation data, crime data,
infrastructure etc.
Is there anything else that I'm forgetting?
3. I would guess that the right way to go about putting it together
would be to use the SANS standard as a basis for a database. The
collection of addresses would then be done on a
municipality-by-municipality basis. As Justin suggested, valuation
rolls might be the best source of data. Either information is already
available, or a PAIA request might be needed. This might be a good
opportunity to test the ability of local government to process PAIA
requests. Hopefully de-centralising the data collection in this way
might encourage members of this community (or others) to collect this
information for their area. Does anyone have any better suggestions?

Adi

On 11 February 2012 17:01, Adi Eyal <adi at burgercom.co.za> wrote:
> Thanks for the responses. I'll admit that I hadn't looked at open streetmaps
> because I didn't expect coverage to be good but ill definitely investigate.
>
> My use case is that I have a list of addresses that I would like to
> a) parse and correct (they were captured through a manual process so are
> likely to contain some errors
> b) validate, I want to check that those addresses do in fact exist
> c) geocode, I want to enrich the address database with x and y coordinates.
>
> There are commercial services that do this at a cost of R2 per record (well
> not a but certainly b and c). Alternatively, you can purchase the entire
> database for half a million.
>
> It seems to me that this type of database must be built on public data. The
> value-add is to collect data from the various municipalities and put it
> together in a single database.
>
> Even so, the price seems a little steep and I have no guarantee of good
> coverage especially since my database includes informal settlements.
>
> I was hoping that someone had already done some of this heavy lifting but if
> not, I might take a stab at it myself.
>
> Adi
>
> On Feb 11, 2012 3:09 PM, "Justin Arenstein" <justinarenstein at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> I don't think there's an open source database for property numbers /
>> locations in SA, but you can get most of this info from municipal valuation
>> rolls. In Mpumalanga they come as CSV files, along with property values,
>> deed registration numbers, etc.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Justin
>>
>>
>>
>> On 10 February 2012 21:28, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 10 February 2012 08:03, Adi Eyal <adi at burgercom.co.za> wrote:
>>> > Hi All
>>> >
>>> > Does anyone know if an open database of streets in South Africa exists
>>> > somewhere? Even better would be a database that includes houses or at
>>>
>>> I don't know how good the coverage but Open Street Map have some data,
>>> see e.g.:
>>>
>>> <http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=-33.995&lon=18.558&zoom=11&layers=M>
>>>
>>> DataHub dataset: <http://thedatahub.org/dataset/osm>
>>>
>>> > least legal numbers in each street. And an even better database would
>>> > give me units as well (e.g. flat 2a)
>>>
>>> The government may have that (it certainly exists in the UK) though it
>>> usually isn't open or even public.
>>>
>>> Rufus
>>>
>>> > Adi
>>> >
>>> > --
>>> > Adi Eyal
>>> > Project Manager
>>> > phone: +27 78 014 2469
>>> > skype: adieyalcas
>>> > www.burgercom.co.za
>>> >
>>> > _______________________________________________
>>> > okfn-za mailing list
>>> > okfn-za at lists.okfn.org
>>> > http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-za
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Co-Founder, Open Knowledge Foundation
>>> Promoting Open Knowledge in a Digital Age
>>> http://www.okfn.org/ - http://blog.okfn.org/
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
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>

-- 
Adi Eyal
Project Manager
phone: +27 78 014 2469
skype: adieyalcas
www.burgercom.co.za