I wonder what experience made this feel more awkward for you (and conversely, why it feels more natural for me). What a weird/complex world we live in!

To help with this, a group of folks (including me) started OpenAddresses (https://openaddresses.io/ and https://github.com/openaddresses/openaddresses/) with the goal of finding every open address dataset in the world. We produce a zip file with 100M's of addresses that several of the APIs mentioned in this thread use as a major part of their dataset. We've been going for well over 10 years now, but it would be great to have more eyes looking for more address sources. Check us out!

https://www.uspsoig.gov/focus-areas/did-you-know/postal-serv...

The USPS knows about deliverable addresses but won't give that information to the federal government because then it'd be public domain and they would lose several of their primary data moats (Zipcodes, addresses, delivery routes, for example). The Census has very complete knowledge of every address, but won't give it up because it's illegal (see Title 13 of the US Code). There is an ongoing attempt by the DOT to collect a National Address Database (https://www.transportation.gov/gis/national-address-database) by collecting information from the address assigning authorities (usually county governments), but it's incomplete and unlikely to ever be complete because of holdout/underfunded local governments.

There are several address datasets that are private (Google has a fairly complete one, FedEx/UPS probably have the most complete, TomTom, CostQuest, etc.). I started https://openaddresses.io/ to try and collect them (NAD is based off this idea) into an open-licensed dataset.

The broadband companies have records that say "this address is connected to this network, which could theoretically have this service level", but (a) they won't/can't tell you where they think the address is and (b) won't spend the time to match their address string format with the government's address because both are private data.

Finally, without the address -> location data, even if we could get broadband providers to tell us what service is available at each address, we couldn't put that service level on a map because we don't know where the address is.

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The Markup published some work in 2022 where they used OpenAddresses to use ISP's own tools to gather per-address service offerings and put them on a map. This is what the FCC's broadband map should be doing, but can't for the above (and political) reasons: https://themarkup.org/show-your-work/2022/10/19/how-we-uncov...

- Hybrid does exactly what you're looking for: http://maps.stamen.com/toner-hybrid/#12/37.7706/-122.3782

But they also break that down into labels and lines:

- Labels: http://maps.stamen.com/toner-labels/#12/37.7706/-122.3782

- Lines: http://maps.stamen.com/toner-lines/#12/37.7706/-122.3782

Their Terrain style has a similar separation:

- Lines: http://maps.stamen.com/terrain-lines/#12/37.7706/-122.3782

- Labels: http://maps.stamen.com/terrain-labels/#12/37.7706/-122.3782

- Background: http://maps.stamen.com/terrain-background/#12/37.7706/-122.3...

While at Mapzen (RIP), I helped generate these from a wide selection of open elevation data sources.

Separately, Google Maps has a terms of use that prevent reuse of Google Maps data. You agree to those terms when visiting Google Maps or using Google Maps API.

You wouldn't be breaking copyright law when copying from Google Maps to OSM, you'd be breaking the terms of use contract with Google and community Norma expectations in OSM.

I helped build the Terrain Tiles dataset as part of Mapzen, which recently shut down. The OpenStreetMap data exists on the AWS Public Datasets page because it's useful to Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. If you're able to convince your company to generate and work with a public dataset, consider reaching out to the AWS and Google public datasets teams to get it hosted and publicized.

The source data is probably the better thing to include in IA, and the GitHub repo is probably the best place to find how to mirror it. If you've got time to spend on it, you might post an issue in there and I can help point you in the right direction.

[0] https://github.com/tilezen/joerd/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aop...

For example, the UK Government flew some excellent LIDAR data missions generating a very high resolution elevation model for most of the country and then put it behind a terrible website where you have to click 3 or 4 times to get a small piece of the data. After a couple hours I built a script to download all the pieces and put them back together into usable sized downloads [1]. Mexico's INEGI has a similar situation, so I had to dig through that to build a scraper [2]. USGS's EarthExplorer uses a terrible shopping cart metaphor for download [3].

All that is to say that the interesting piece with Earth on AWS is that this is public data that smart people are putting in a more easily accessible place for mass consumption and AWS is footing the bill. In return AWS is getting people more interested in AWS products and a set of customers that are more knowledgeable about how to process data "in the cloud".

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/public-datasets/terrain/

[1] https://github.com/iandees/uk-lidar

[2] https://github.com/iandees/mx-lidar

[3] https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/

http://www.columbia.edu/~fdc/postal/ is a pretty good overview of most of the postal addressing systems around the world.