Following in the footsteps of the increasingly successful Open Street Map project, OpenAddresses.org has been launched as a web portal for the management of free and open address data, plus free and open geocoding and reverse geocoding. OpenAddresses.org includes actual address data, so it is much finer grained than the similar GeoNames.org database which is limited to places. OpenAddresses.org is intended to be complementary to Open Street Map and not in competition.

I suspect OpenAddresses.org will have data completeness problems: Can it guarantee that it has all (or a reasonably high percentage of all) of the street addresses for a particular area?  Will people delete their own addresses for privacy?

Further information can be found at the Open Addresses User Guide Wiki. We already have a technical overview of GeoNames.org due for publication in the next couple of weeks, and will publish a full overview of OpenAddresses.org in the next couple of months.