2 ms·

Is that not what this very article describes? > Mimirsbrunn (or simply Mimir) is the search engine of Qwant Maps. It allows to search for the following "punctu

Is that not what this very article describes? > Mimirsbrunn (or simply Mimir) is the search engine of Qwant Maps. It allows to search for the following "punctual" geospatial objects: addresses, administrative areas and points of interest. It is a web service of geocoding (or more precisely geoparsing) that matches the user unstructured text query with a specific point (or area) on the map (i.e. a latitude and a longitude). The complexity of the problem is to disambiguate user requests. The roots of this ambiguity are numerous. First of all there are a large number of possible interpretations in the world for a given mention of a place: the difficulty is to choose the most "relevant" interpretation. Then there is the natural ambiguity due to the natural language: the user often looks for a place whose the exact spelling is not necessarily known.

tuukkah 7y ago
How does Mimirsbrunn differ from Pelias? https://pelias.io https://pelias.io
- ephesee 7y ago
  Both are geocoders using OpenStreetMap data and backed with Elasticsearch. The main difference is how they handle geographical context, eg to determine in which city/region each place is located. Which is useful both for indexing the data and producing human-readable labels. Pelias is using its own gazeteer (https://whosonfirst.org/ https://whosonfirst.org/) to index locations and remarkable zones. Whereas Mimirsbrunn relies only on OSM data for this task using Cosmogony (https://github.com/osm-without-borders/cosmogony https://github.com/osm-without-borders/cosmogony), a tool that extracts official administrative boundaries and other shapes from OSM data. But the world is a complicated place, and OSM tagging scheme doesn't always lend itself to geocoding purposes. So it comes with a lot a caveats which are still being working on :)
  - tuukkah 7y ago
    Thanks! I can see how using Cosmogony can make sense if Who's on First is too complex but I'm afraid OSM doesn't have enough coverage of administrative boundaries. The boundaries are mostly not visible in the physical world and thus cannot be mapped in the traditional sense. I wonder if there's an open catalog of boundary data analogous to https://openaddresses.io/ https://openaddresses.io/

tuukkah 7y ago

How does Mimirsbrunn differ from Pelias? https://pelias.io https://pelias.io

ephesee 7y ago
Both are geocoders using OpenStreetMap data and backed with Elasticsearch. The main difference is how they handle geographical context, eg to determine in which city/region each place is located. Which is useful both for indexing the data and producing human-readable labels. Pelias is using its own gazeteer (https://whosonfirst.org/ https://whosonfirst.org/) to index locations and remarkable zones. Whereas Mimirsbrunn relies only on OSM data for this task using Cosmogony (https://github.com/osm-without-borders/cosmogony https://github.com/osm-without-borders/cosmogony), a tool that extracts official administrative boundaries and other shapes from OSM data. But the world is a complicated place, and OSM tagging scheme doesn't always lend itself to geocoding purposes. So it comes with a lot a caveats which are still being working on :)
- tuukkah 7y ago
  Thanks! I can see how using Cosmogony can make sense if Who's on First is too complex but I'm afraid OSM doesn't have enough coverage of administrative boundaries. The boundaries are mostly not visible in the physical world and thus cannot be mapped in the traditional sense. I wonder if there's an open catalog of boundary data analogous to https://openaddresses.io/ https://openaddresses.io/