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" version 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) - the 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