what3words addresses for OSM buildings

[This post has moved to: http://blog.spatialbits.de/post/what3words-addresses-for-OSM-buildings/]

A while ago I experimented with assigning multilingual what3words addresses to OpenStreetMap buildings in Sierra Leone.
I basically downloaded the OSM data, derived the buildings and their centroids and published a map based on CartoDB. Upon a click the what3words-API was queried for the addresses in multiple languages.

 There are some obvious disadvantages to this approach.

• it operates on a static database - hence updates in the OSM database are not taken into account.
• it doesn't scale very well. According to taginfo there are currently > 157.000.000 buildings in the OSM database. 
• A user would only want to query a few buildings of particular interest. 

So here is a new approach, which makes it possible to easily find what3words addresses for all OSM buildings:

https://spatialbitz.github.io/w3w4osm/ 

Just click on any building in the map and afterwards on the red dot, marking the center of the geometry. You can also search for a place/address of interest.



Ideas/things to improve:

• advanced geocoding functionality 
• what3words geocoding support
• support for all what3words-languages
• API-error handling & notifications 
• fine-tune the overpass-API calls (feature types, bbox) 
• improve design 
•  ... 

I'd be happy to accept pull-request, go ahead and fork the project on github!
Also I'd love to hear feedback regarding the usefulness of this approach and/or real world applications using OSM data with what3words addresses.