Nominatim/FAQ

Index

How often if the index updated

Data is imported nightly however it can take 24 hours before data is fully indexed and available for searching. As a result data will normally be available around 48 hours after it is added to OSM. HOWEVER: due to various bugs during the initial release it is currently running behind and some data added 7 days ago is still not fully indexed - place be patient.

My data is still missing and it's been several days

You can verify if you data has been loaded and force it to be indexed using the following url

 http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/details?osmtype=[N|W|W]&osmid=<idnumber>

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?

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.

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 / create an admin boundary relation that explicity

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.

Why wasn't anything found for my search

There are a number of reasons why no result may have been found:

1. There is no result currently in osm that matches your criteria
2. The data has not yet been indexed, nominatim is normally a minimum of 2 days behind.
3. There are significant differences in the spaces (i.e. placestrasse & place strasse)
4. 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)