OpenAddresses is a directory of publicly available address lists provided by government agencies at various levels. It's designed to be bulk imported by machine.
Many addresses exist in OSM. But there's a preference from the OSM community that data be entered by users familiar with their areas, that they can verify on the ground. Imports have happened in OSM, such as the controversial TIGER import in the US years ago, and the NYC building dataset more recently. But these require a lot of effort and attention to manage well.
It's not out of the question, however there are many obstacles to overcome, such as licensing, validation, and the fact that the OSM community generally insists on manually entered data.
I've heard many folks push for consolidation of various open data projects, so they aren't "competing" for contributions. However the reality is that they are currently very different and each serves to bridge a very specific gap.
In the meantime, it makes a lot of sense for projects relying on open data to pull all of these sources in, as Mapzen Search is doing, to ensure the best possible coverage.
That's the wrong question - the question is wether the sources from OpenAddresses can be merged into OSM. I know of at least Denmark that there was some address import.
Mapzen uses only open data, in particular OpenStreetMap and OpenAddresses (http://openaddresses.io/). This means anyone can improve the results and always have access to the data if something's missing.
Nominatim, which I worked with at MapQuest Open when it launched, is a great geocoder for purely OSM data. We built Pelias (https://github.com/pelias) at Mapzen because Nominatim is not built to handle autocomplete. We also wanted to start with a fulltext search engine -- Elasticsearch in this case -- instead of Postgres with search logic on top of it. We also wanted to search other open datasets like the fast-growing OpenAddresses.
They're great and we have many friends at both companies. Our main goal is to get map data and software into the open so others working toward that goal are not really competitors.
If there's overlap, I don't see why that's a bad thing. The geo industry has had the problem of too few options for a while. More options are a good thing.
Search Product Manager - New York, San Francisco, London, Berlin
At Mapzen we take a different approach to the core components of mapping: open source, open data, open access. We make modular tools for building better maps because we believe that healthy mapping ecosystems are ones that are diverse, sustainable, and accessible to all.
We're building a geocoder on top of entirely open data. We're providing it for use as a hosted service and designed it for modular use and improvement by developers. Geocoding and search are among the most complex problems in open source mapping today, and we believe that the best way to solve those problems is to build open services, software, and community around better search and better data.
As product manager, you will help and guide a team of developers toward our feature, quality, and community goals. You'll have an understanding of current open datasets (and be on the lookout for new ones) and an interest in figuring out how they can fit together for geocoding. Your perspective is global, with an appreciation for diverse addressing systems and ideas about how to build software that works for everyone. You know how to assess quality search results, and how to investigate and improve results that fall short of user expectations.
Nominatim is not built to handle autocomplete, which is a requirement for many consumer apps. Thus the focus on Lucene, where you get that for free, instead of building your own fulltext search on top of PostGIS.
Many addresses exist in OSM. But there's a preference from the OSM community that data be entered by users familiar with their areas, that they can verify on the ground. Imports have happened in OSM, such as the controversial TIGER import in the US years ago, and the NYC building dataset more recently. But these require a lot of effort and attention to manage well.