[OSM-dev] Name finder for the main OSM page?

[Tom Hughes]

In message <46B987A7.4060107 at frankieandshadow.com>
          David Earl <david at frankieandshadow.com> wrote:

> When you're zoomed in you often lose the context of where you are. We
> could have a "Where am I" button. This would consult the name finder
> with the query "places near <lat>,<lon>" where <lat>,<lon> comes from
> the current map centre, and show the results in a panel like the search
> panel (linked in the same way).
> 
> You'd need to filter the results to show only those with non-zero rank
> (to exclude results like "Ingham Place" matching the word place), so
> you'd get a list like
>     1km west of Teversham
>     4km east if Cambridge
>     24km south of Ely
>     ...

I've been playing with this using the three queries that your new
version uses and I've found a couple of issues...

The "towns near" and "places near" queries generally behave fairly
sensibly, and give things near "requestedplace" which has the lat
and lon I supplied.

The "cities near" query does not do this however, and gives me all
sorts of wierd results which are relative to other places and not
the lat and lon I gave. My test case of 51.76,0.0 which is just north
of London gives me Bristol as the first result!

A second problem is that it doesn't cope with wrapping around the
zero meridian - as you can probably guess from that test case I live
about half a mile or so from the meridian and I find that if I'm to
the east of it I only find towns to the east and vice verse when I'm
to the west of it.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://www.compton.nu/