In 2019 I participated again in open Summer of Code. This year I was part of the Best@ team, where we worked together with FOD BOSA DT on an open address project.

Bosa had started this project after recently opening up a dataset with all the addresses in Belgium along with their coordinates. The data was only available in XML format and so we were tasked to develop tools to transform this data to other formats. Additionally we were asked to help make this dataset more accessible and to promote it so others could find it. During the month of July I helped develop tools and notebooks using the data.

Tools

We created a variety of Python command line tools to convert, filter and use the data.

The tools allow you to:

Notebooks

With the address data converted by the tools it became much easier to explore it. This allowed me to make a collection of Jupyter notebooks using the address data in fun and interesting ways

Visualisations

The Addresses in Belgium visualized with a heatmap

I also made a heatmap visualization of the addresses in Belgium using datashader showing the density of buildings in our country. For the demo day I combined this with bokeh to make it interactive.

Openaddresses

With our tools we were also able to include the data into openaddresses.io, a global open address file that is already used by many applications. With this, we were able to set up a Geocoder service in no time, which was then actually used by some other teams during the project.