Talk:Nominatim

Bug Reports

Please report bugs using the Nominatim component in Trac rather than on the talk page.

Help

Ask a question or look up answers on OSM's question-and-answer site, help.openstreetmap.org.

Address Interpolation

Do you have plans to implement address interpolation? Meaning that if you have 'addr:interpolation: even' from 2 to 20, to generate numbers 4 to 18 by interpolation? --chris66 23:57, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Interpolation is implemented and working. There was a small bug in the code that has caused a some places not to be correctly indexed. This bug has now been fixed --Twain 00:24, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Additional problems found with interpolation that are causing some locations to still not be added. Still investigating. --Twain 13:02, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

geolocalisation on the GUI

Hi, It would be nice to have a way to read the lat & lon on the page when a spot is chosen (the center of the map) for example at Besançon, France I could add nominatim as a way to find localisation, for example on the wikitravel pages. FrViPofm 10:40, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

See trac #2677. Please note, adding items in multiple locations without linking them is not helpful. --Twain 13:02, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Suggestion for helping translation

q=église%2C+Besançon give one false result when q=church%2C+Besançon give several result

I suggest to create wiki sub-pages for suggesting translations as Nominatim/translation/FR with somethonk like (that is only one line in the code)

église: church

Should we create a syntax like

boucherie halal: shop=butcher + butcher=halal

--FrViPofm 22:59, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

See trac #2678, already present see also special phrases --Twain 13:02, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Find road intersection

Is this possible, i. e. X street corner Y street, Z city.

Does Nominatim consider the is_in tag?

I really hope not...

Can someone please explain exactly what, if any, support Nominatim has for the is_in tag? It be good to know, as an argument against that awful tag. (Yes, I'm on a crusade to get rid it) --Gorm 11:27, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

See Nominatim/Development overview and Nominatim/FAQ - I'm afraid I don't know whether the details there are exact enough for you though? --EdLoach 12:31, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

limit to bounding box

Is it possible to limit the search to a bounding box? (I think now the web interface.) It would be useful to look up one kind of POI in an area, like "playgrounds inside [19.03,47.5,19.06,47.48]"... The search field above seems to be an indicator rather than a limit (eg. does basically nothing). I tried to simulate it by finding something nearby like "playground, citadella, budapest"... not perfect. --grin ✎ 09:25, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

It is now . You can add an extra parameter 'bounded=1' which will lock the search to the bounding box -- Twain 14:28, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Address Standard

Does Nominatim follow any international address standard (UPU, ISO 19160)? --Christian Karrié 13:27, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

nominatim follows the OSM addressing standards. I can't see how any of the standards you mention would be relevant -- Twain 11:18, 21 April 2011 (BST)

I do have Addresses for areas in the woods but not in the city, is there a map available showing coverage? Or is the data format different for different regions? --Efried (talk) 15:48, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

nominatim not up to date (january 2011 - and still in April 2011, and again from august 2011)

Since two weeks or so nominatim is not updating anymore, nor does it show the date of last update on it’s page http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ Why? The lag graph (http://munin.openstreetmap.org/openstreetmap/katie.openstreetmap/nominatim_lag.html) isn’t updating, too. Wicking 09:47, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

Just over a week ago we switched to an updated code base for nominatim. It was expected that we would be back up to date by now but as ever with these things the update didn't go that smoothly. We should be back up to date some time this week. -- Twain 14:27, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

from Ceyockey This still appears to be a problem as of 12 February. I found out when checking to see if uploaded boundaries supporting the HOT response for the 2010 Colombia Floods could be found by name search in the the map - they are not (at least not those uploaded in the past month or so). 14:13, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Yup, still problems although they are nearly resolved. Few more days should do it and then we should be right up to date. -- Twain 15:37, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

from Ceyockey Thank you. Should there be a date following the "DATA:" term in the header? 01:40, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

It seems still to be an issue on Feb, 27th. Any idea when updating could become active again? Thanks.

Still no Nominatim updates nor any information what the problem is. Is this being discussed somewhere else? --Hobbesvsboyle 20:02, 5 April 2011 (BST)

I can tell that the objects that I added two days ago are showing up in Nominatim, but the objects that I modified today are not, and the "force update" link is not working - says Unable to connect to database, a problem that has been reported both in Trac and Help as early as January 2011. Any insight?--Ponzu 08:48, 11 April 2011 (BST)

Nominatim is currently averaging 2 to 3 minutes behind (at time of writing). -- Twain 10:07, 28 April 2011 (BST)

It's working? it seems that isn't updating at all. No new streets yet, after 1 month (like in Maletto (Sicily) and Aci Castello (Sicily)) place_ids seems stuck at ~2147300000 --Arlas 18:32, 23 July 2011 (BST)

Right, there seems to be another updating problem again. Did you contact Twain? --Scai 15:57, 25 July 2011 (BST)

dunno how to contact him :( --Arlas 22:24, 25 July 2011 (BST)

I wrote him a message. You can contact users by visiting their profile and using the "E-mail this user" option on the left. --Scai 09:51, 26 July 2011 (BST)

He told me he is currently working on a fix. --Scai 18:41, 9 August 2011 (BST)

Excellent news, Scai. Any thoughts on how to recruit additional support so that this does not remain a single-person dependency? --Ceyockey 04:39, 10 August 2011 (BST)

Root cause?

I am beginning to wonder whether there is a funding problem related to a required fix. Might that be the case? --Ceyockey 23:09, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

I have asked the author of Nominatim (twain) to publish an 'official' message on what is happening. Spod 05:18, 21 April 2011 (BST)

Impact on the MapQuest collaboration?

Does Nominatim being out of date negatively impact the quality of content that MapQuest Beta contains, which is a collaboration between MapQuest and OSM Foundation? It would seem it should considering the opening passage of Nominatim. --Ceyockey 01:22, 4 August 2011 (BST)

MapQuest is a OSM data user. There is no special MapQuest / OSMF link. http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ proxies requests to the MapQuest instance of due to nominatim admin being overstretched. -- Firefishy 16:05, 19 August 2011 (BST)

Nominatim indexing 3 month behind

Noting that the indexing did catch up to 19 August 2011 ... but has not been updated since. Wondering if this was a one-off update in lieu of regular updates? --Ceyockey 01:31, 21 September 2011 (BST)

Any update on this issue? --Dampfklon 22:46, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

Nominatim indicate that the last update is on 19th august 2011, it's now 3 month with no updates ? What happend to Nominatim, it's used by OSM and OpenMapQuest as the search tool...Padorange 06:08, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

OSM currently uses MapQuest's Nominatim instance as the redirection indicates. As far as I know the problem why our service isn't updated anymore is missing manpower. Why MapQuest doesn't update their version is unknown to me. Either way a really disappointing situation. --Scai 10:13, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

Accoring to MapQuest they are aware of an issue and expect the data to be up to date again in early 2012. [1]

Updated

The date in Nominatim now reads 2011/12/07 ... meaning December 7, 2011, I presume. Thanks for updating the index! Are there thoughts on when updates will become a regular business-as-usual operation? --Ceyockey 17:24, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

Problem

The address lookup does not work properly. When I enter: Gießener Straße, Gießen, it should list the Gießener Straße in 35396 Gießen-Wieseck, which is the only street with this exact adress, e.g. located in city of Gießen proper. Instead, it lists about 12 streets Gießener Straße in Landkreis Gießen, which have different postal adresses, e.g. Gießener Straße, Heuchelheim, or Gießener Straße, Lollar. Nominatim should place more value on postal_codes if available, instead of "is_in". Longbow4u 19:12, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm afraid I don't really understand the bug report -- Twain 11:18, 21 April 2011 (BST)

I'll try to help, as I have seen similar issues. The problem is that a user entering the query "Gießener Straße, Gießen" is probably looking for the street "Gießener Straße" in the German city "Gießen" (in Hessen). The problem is that the district (Landkreis) surrounding the city is also called "Gießen" ("Landkreis Gießen"). Apparently Nominatim searches both the city and the Landkreis Gießen, and thus finds many matching streets. The problem is really that the query "Gießener Straße, Gießen" is ambiguous, as it can mean both "Gießener Straße in the city of Gießen" (of which there is only one), or "Gießener Straße in the Landkreis of Gießen" (of which there are many). I'm not sure how to resolve this, but one way would be to try and search the smaller objects first (i.e., if there's both a town and a district with a given name, try the town first), on the assumption that those results are more likely to be relevant. Sleske 10:15, 13 May 2011 (BST)

Comparison to other gazetteer resources

I am wondering how Nominatim might compare to other gazetteer resources, such as the USGS GNIS system or the one underlying Google Maps in terms of coverage, granularity and synonym depth. --Ceyockey 17:17, 10 September 2011 (BST)

I'd more inclined to describe Nominatim as "geocoding" software than a "gazetteer resource". It's search software which uses OpenStreetMap as it's database (Gazetteer?). Here on the wiki the page Geocoding redirects to Search engines, which has a list. Not a comparison yet, but a list. Was that the kind of thing you meant?

Incidentally at some point we might want to think about whether we want Search to redirect to Nominatim (as it does now) or that more general list, or something else.

But I suppose the other thing you could compare, which is maybe what you meant, is using OpenStreetMap to feed into a geocoder versus using other datasets such as USGS GNIS.

And yet another thing, is comparing the OSM-based Search engines with closed counterparts such as google maps search. I can imagine building up some interesting lists of edge cases where google does better and we need to improve nominatim. I see there's already an edge cases list at Nominatim/TestCases (probably out of date). As well as those cases, there's more general features where google wins, such as spelling corrections, and dataset features such as knowing about UK postcodes.

-- Harry Wood (talk) 17:43, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

nearby search? HOWTO?

Hello,

I am looking for a way to search businesses within a circle (or a polygon) around a GPS coord. It will be nice if I am able to additionally filter results by passing in a parameter such as "coffee" or "school". I looked around, but could not find exactly what I wanted. I have looked at the wiki page for Nominatim, various other forums etc. Here are couple of searches i tried which gave me only one result. How do i increase the number of results I get back?

http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?format=xml&q=41.760584,-88.320071 That returns only one place thats at that specific lat lon.

http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?format=xml&viewbox=-88.85,42.25,-87.65,41.05&q=coffee&bounded=1&limit=100 That returns a few (<100) coffee shops in the bounding box, however, they are definitely not all.

Finally, if I want all places in the bounding box, (so if I omit the "q" param) I dont get any results at all.

So, how to really do this?

Best, Sachin Dole Sachin Dole 21:08, 20 July 2012 (BST)

> Finally, if I want all places in the bounding box, (so if I omit the "q" param) I dont get any results at all.

This isn't really Nominatim's task, you can use a simple XAPI or OverpassAPI query for this. --Scai 19:23, 20 July 2012 (BST)

Thank you! Thank you very much! I read through the docs and found that I could run a bbox query on xapi. It looks like stuff that I need. However, I have an additional question. I ran my requests against the rambler.ru server. That took 8 seconds to find all places within a small bounding box in Chicago area. http://jxapi.osm.rambler.ru/xapi/api/0.6/node%5bamenity=*%5d%5bbbox=-87.6668175558495,41.87111869318251,-87.598153005071,41.88087786790583%5d Is that the best performance that can be drawn out of this system or will i be able to draw sub second performance if I download, install it myself and run it on real fast hardware? Sachin Dole 21:08, 20 July 2012 (BST)

Just so you know: I am aware that download, install and maintain is not a trivial task. I am considering doing it and hence the question. Sachin Dole 21:33, 20 July 2012 (BST)

I guess it really depends on the current load and your hardware, of course. You can also try the Overpass API. It has its own query syntax as well as a XAPI compatibility layer. There have been various problems with the XAPI in the past so Overpass API might be faster, but try it yourself. --Scai 10:53, 21 July 2012 (BST)

handing over different parts of the address individually

is there a way to hand over the individual parts of an address in the request instead of mashing it all up in a single "q" parameter and let nominatim guess the correct interpretation? i'm thinking of something like http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?q_country=DE&q_zip=12345&q_city=MyTown&q_street=Testdrive&q_housenr=23 --Flaimo 21:00, 30 July 2012 (BST)

Search for OSM ID

Feature request to limit results and performance, maybe possibility to search for OSM ID. I'm thinking if someone first searches for city and get 5 matches so no need to have polygons enabled here yet, then picking one and it would load in the polygons for only this element thus pass the relation ID with polygon to true and not search again on the entire query. Good or bad? --Floppe 11:49, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

This would be *very* useful! --j3d (talk) 14:23, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

Reverse Geocoding with poi distance

Good day. With Reverse Geocoding is possible obtain distance information to custom POIs, polygons, or nearby cities?

Thanks --Sergio.hernandez.p

That's not really the purpose of Nominatim. But you can use Overpass API to retrieve specific POIs, towns and anything else around a given position. --Scai 14:44, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

The objetive is identify the nearest point to a specific coordinate, in this way, the App sends latitude and longitude and the service would answer back with the nearest place information/location. In addition, if the service is able to get the coordinate information, there will not be any problem to calculate the distance. On the other hand, is important to define how to add personalized points in order to display a more accurate location.

Cities, suburbs and industrial areas

It looks like that Nominatim fails to correctly report the industrial areas of a city. Livorno seems to have only one industrial area [2], instead of few [3].

We suppose it is due to the presence of suburbs that results closer and so "parent of" some of these areas.

Ok, looking at the wiki wiki suburbs can be parent of industries. Should the landuse=industrial be assigned *both* to suburb and to the most close city/town/village ? --FabC (talk) 18:30, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Problem(?) with address result form for Belgium places.

When you search a place in Belgium, the form of the response is - in my opinion - not very clear. I explain. The admin levels that defines a place are not always the good ones. In particularly :

admin_level=7 : the administrative arrondissements refers to the city in charge of judicial and electoral affairs. Never used by Belgium people to locate a place. It can make confusion when you type a city name cause the response contains an other city name. I think that the result should be "CityA, arrondissement of CityB" in place of "CityA, CityB". Or better, don't mention the arrondissement, just "CityA".
admin_level=3 : the linguistic communities refers to cultural and educational politics. The link with the territory is quite complex (for example Brussels is in both flemish and french communities). Like the previous point, it's never used by Belgium people to locate a place, we prefer to mention the region (admin level 4). It's not so problematic than level 7 but i think it is unnecessary information that makes a more complex response from nominatim.

Is it thinkable to change that ? If this is the case, i think we have to vote before and to speak a lot about. Belgium has definitely the most complex political structure . So if we can map it, we can map all the world ;) --Corentin (talk) 12:41, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Pick Point mentions OpenStreetMap in Terms of Service

Lonvia has removed Pick Point as they did not mention OpenStreetMap or Nominatim on their page. But they mentioned OpenStreetMap on their Terms of Service page. Can this be considered a valid mention and credits back to OSM/Nominatim? Srihari Thalla (talk) 11:09, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Link to this page from the Main Page

a "view search engine documentation" button to allow users to leave the search results and take a peek at the search engine documentation, so they can point feature requests to the correct github repos, and help contribute to the direction of OSM.