Nominatim/FAQ
Contents |
Index
How often is the index updated
Data is imported and indexed as fast as possible. You can find how far behind the service currently is by looking at the lag graph (lag is in minutes)
My data is still missing and it's been several days
Check the date of the latest data refresh at the top of http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ as there may be a delay with the refresh. If it's up to date, you can verify if your data has been loaded using the following url
http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/details?osmtype=[N|W|R]&osmid=<idnumber>
where "N" is node, "W" is way and "R" is relation. For objects with bigint id numbers this will fail with error message "Please select a place id".
If no item is found then your data has not been loaded, please report the problem and the osm id number of the feature using trac.openstreetmap.org.
Addresses
How was the address calculated?
For features down to street level addresses are calculated using a combination of admin boundaries, is_in tags and place features. For building level features addresses are calculated using the address of the most suitable street. If no explicit boundaries or relations are include the system will fall back to a simple 'nearest' calculation - this will often be wrong!
For more details see the Development Overview. To see a full breakdown of how the address was created and links to the OSM features used click the 'details' link at the end of each search result.
How do I fix the address?
of a Building / Amenity / House
If a building has the wrong street either add a addr:street or a associatedStreet relation. This can either be added to the individual address node or the addr:interpolation way.
of a Street / City / County
If a street or higher level feature (city, town, county, etc.) has the wrong address you can either add a is_in tag to provide an explicit address or, preferably, draw a polygon or create an admin boundary relation for the feature that should contain it.
postal codes
Please add missing postal codes as either nodes or (where possible) as polygons.
Why doesn't Nominatim process addr:* tags on buildings
For performance reasons buildings (and other low level features) are not fully indexed, but are instead simply inherit from their parent street. As such all addr:* tags (except addr:street) are ignored.
Search Results
Why wasn't anything found for my search
There are a number of reasons why no result may have been found:
- There is no data currently in OSM which matches your criteria. Data which you expect to match may be defective in some way. For example, if you search for "Springfield, Massachusetts", it may not be found if the state border has been damaged and no longer encloses Springfield.
- The data has not yet been indexed, nominatim is normally a minimum of 2 days behind.
- There are significant differences in the spaces (i.e. placestrasse & place strasse)
- The search query is out of order (i.e. City, Street, Country) (Note: this seems to be a common German search query which currently doesn't work)
- The search query does not use the correct encoding
