[OSM-dev] Anyone with a speedy gazetteer

[Milo van der Linden]

As Tom Hughes suggested earlier on; perhaps it would be smart to use 
postgres,

especially since somany postgres/postgis instances are lying around for 
the mapnik servers that the openstreetmap community uses. My guess would 
be that a lot of people would be able to support you:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/textsearch.html
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/fuzzystrmatch.html

The textsearch module for postgresql handles records in the database as 
"documents"; giving you a broad variety of search functions.

Perhaps this is the right compromis between a real search engine and 
searching records in a database.

Regarding the near by; this would mainly mean "select this and that 
where searchterm="bla" and distance(the_geom, yourlocation) < x.

The last query needs an extremely good design since distance functions 
perform somewhat problematic..




Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Nicolas Guillaumin wrote:
>   
>> Excuse me if it's a silly question (I'm a newbie here), but what about using
>> a search engine component instead of SQL queries ?
>> I think about Apache Lucene (Java search engine) for example (
>> http://lucene.apache.org/) which seems to me a better solution about
>> indexing and searching than SQL requests ?
>>     
>
> Most of these are based on the concept of "documents" that are 
> "searched", and they don't usually have a spatial component.
>
> What we need is something that searches for objects in our database of 
> roughly half a billion elements, ideally also doing things like "a near 
> b", where position is expressed in coordinates.
>
> It is not impossible that some of the existing engines could be tweaked 
> to work but personally I think we're better of investing work in our own 
> database.
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
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