I was originally going to remind everybody, particularly those resident
in the canton Berne, that we have an ongoing project to import addresses
and trace buildings that is not complete yet
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Canton_of_Bern_Address_Import and
then I was going to point out that besides the addresses from the canton
of Zürich that will become available at the beginning of January, that
from our correspondence with the BfS we would be expecting the first
address data from the GWR to be available for download in the next
quarter too.

However yesterday we were a bit surprised by the announcement that data
from the GWR would become available immediately in a provisional form
(this is what we had actually been actually asking the BfS to do, as
there is no clear reason to wait till the "official" v!
 ersion
is prepared
by swisstopo, however they hadn't responded in a positive way).

The downside is that, beside swisstopo and the BfS creating the
impression of a not really well thought out, rather uncoordinated
effort, it is currently not clear what the actual licence/use conditions
are (there are lots of links being sent around which lead to
conflicting, sometimes year old information). We'll see if we can
clarify this next week.

I've generated a short comparison of where we are in OSM currently vs.
the GWR data:  http://qa.poole.ch/addresses/ch_canton

Noteworthy points:

- last year roughly end of the year we had  667'807 addresses vs.
868'960 now, an increase of a good 120'000. Most of this is due to 
Berne increasing from 88'817 to 190'243 (actually the very small
increase in the other cantons is slightly disappointing)
- th!
 e weak
cantons are those that we expected
- the GWR numbers are lower than those in the available cantonal
datasets mainly due to a more restrictive definition of what an address is.

As soon as we've clarified the licence situation, we can have a look
what the best way will be to utilize the data one way or another.

Simon