5 ms·

God, no. Everyone is trying to build a Geocoder and everyone is failing, because no one is actually realizing that geocoding is probably the most complex topic

God, no. Everyone is trying to build a Geocoder and everyone is failing, because no one is actually realizing that geocoding is probably the most complex topic in GIS. "Yeah, let's put some Elasticsearch and PostgreSQL and it will work out fine." No, it won't - you have no idea. And of course you won't believe me, but let me list some problems you will have that you don't realize right now: * There is a lot of different charsets. Latin, kyrillic, there are umlauts, RTL, weird abbreviations, language standards that you don't know, because you don't know enough about foreign cultures. * It's a shitload of data: OpenStreetMap is expanded about 700 GB large (not including history). And you will want to have autocompletition or autosuggestion, so response times will have to be < 100 ms. * Ranking. Your user types "Tokyo". Is it the restaurant next to the user, is it the capital of Japan or is it some village next to Shitfuckistan? No matter what, it will take you about a year to get any usable result. So I suggest you to look into Nominatim (the standard geocoder of OpenStreetMap which has actually got a lot better) or Photon (a geocoder based on the Nominatim DB, but with auto suggestion).

ronaldx 12y ago
Agree that Nominatim is awesome. The way it handles disambiguation is thoughtful. In my opinion, it's better than any closed source competitor.
nodata 12y ago
> or is it some village next to Shitfuckistan? Wow, where did that come from?
- natch 12y ago
  I'm going to guess it comes from the frustration of getting dumb results rankings that don't take into account the likelihood that the result is actually something you wanted.
- tekknolagi 12y ago
  Probably TheOatmeal.com (http://theoatmeal.com/comics/shopping_cart http://theoatmeal.com/comics/shopping_cart)
freyfogle 12y ago
Thanks, but it's too late, we're fallen under the geo spell. We're very familiar with nominatim (it's many strengths, but also significant weaknesses), and the challenge of geocoding across many different parts of the world, which as you mention are not trivial.
- ronaldx 12y ago
  Geocoding is a problem that needs to be solved well once, and open for everyone to use. Since you seem to share Nominatim's goals, why have you decided to create your own solution rather than work to improve Nominatim's weaknesses? Genuinely curious.
  - freyfogle 12y ago
    What makes you think we will not be working with and improving nominatim, or many of the other good open tools and datasets (for example geonames to mention just one of several)? Sorry if I've implied that. For some context, my company, Lokku, has sponsored many a SotM (including the first one in 2007, and we're sponsoring SotM-EU next month), has repeatedly donated what I like to think are significant sums to the OSM foundation, and this year our company xmas gift to clients was a donation on their behalf to HOT-OSM. We're members of the UK's Open Data Institute, were one of the first companies to move to using OSM tiles in place of Google, run #geomob (a geo innovation meetup in London, hope to see you at our next one which happens to be tomorrow), and actively invest in geo start ups like SplashMaps. So I think I can safely say: we get it. We've looked at nominatim and contributed to the code. Like any complex codebase it has strengths and weaknesses. It is a significant improvement on what came before, congrats to all who contributed. It does not follow from that that all effort at inventing a better future has to fall under the nominatim umbrella. My question is not should we try to build a better geocoding service (be it an extension of nominatim, a replacement of nominatim, or whatever) It is what would it look like? Some links to the various points above about what we've been up to at Lokku http://geomobldn.org/ http://geomobldn.org/ http://blog.lokku.com/post/77055320403/investing-in-splashmaps http://blog.lokku.com/post/77055320403/investing-in-splashma... http://blog.lokku.com/post/70479246283/donating-to-the-humanitarian-openstreetmap-team http://blog.lokku.com/post/70479246283/donating-to-the-human...
amiramir 12y ago
Another new player that looks promising is Pelias (http://mapzen.com/pelias/ http://mapzen.com/pelias/). Early days but it's open source (https://github.com/mapzen/pelias https://github.com/mapzen/pelias) and it seems to be improving at a good clip.

ronaldx 12y ago

Agree that Nominatim is awesome. The way it handles disambiguation is thoughtful. In my opinion, it's better than any closed source competitor.

nodata 12y ago

> or is it some village next to Shitfuckistan? Wow, where did that come from?

natch 12y ago
I'm going to guess it comes from the frustration of getting dumb results rankings that don't take into account the likelihood that the result is actually something you wanted.
tekknolagi 12y ago
Probably TheOatmeal.com (http://theoatmeal.com/comics/shopping_cart http://theoatmeal.com/comics/shopping_cart)

freyfogle 12y ago

Thanks, but it's too late, we're fallen under the geo spell. We're very familiar with nominatim (it's many strengths, but also significant weaknesses), and the challenge of geocoding across many different parts of the world, which as you mention are not trivial.

ronaldx 12y ago
Geocoding is a problem that needs to be solved well once, and open for everyone to use. Since you seem to share Nominatim's goals, why have you decided to create your own solution rather than work to improve Nominatim's weaknesses? Genuinely curious.
- freyfogle 12y ago
  What makes you think we will not be working with and improving nominatim, or many of the other good open tools and datasets (for example geonames to mention just one of several)? Sorry if I've implied that. For some context, my company, Lokku, has sponsored many a SotM (including the first one in 2007, and we're sponsoring SotM-EU next month), has repeatedly donated what I like to think are significant sums to the OSM foundation, and this year our company xmas gift to clients was a donation on their behalf to HOT-OSM. We're members of the UK's Open Data Institute, were one of the first companies to move to using OSM tiles in place of Google, run #geomob (a geo innovation meetup in London, hope to see you at our next one which happens to be tomorrow), and actively invest in geo start ups like SplashMaps. So I think I can safely say: we get it. We've looked at nominatim and contributed to the code. Like any complex codebase it has strengths and weaknesses. It is a significant improvement on what came before, congrats to all who contributed. It does not follow from that that all effort at inventing a better future has to fall under the nominatim umbrella. My question is not should we try to build a better geocoding service (be it an extension of nominatim, a replacement of nominatim, or whatever) It is what would it look like? Some links to the various points above about what we've been up to at Lokku http://geomobldn.org/ http://geomobldn.org/ http://blog.lokku.com/post/77055320403/investing-in-splashmaps http://blog.lokku.com/post/77055320403/investing-in-splashma... http://blog.lokku.com/post/70479246283/donating-to-the-humanitarian-openstreetmap-team http://blog.lokku.com/post/70479246283/donating-to-the-human...

amiramir 12y ago

Another new player that looks promising is Pelias (http://mapzen.com/pelias/ http://mapzen.com/pelias/). Early days but it's open source (https://github.com/mapzen/pelias https://github.com/mapzen/pelias) and it seems to be improving at a good clip.