[OSM-dev] Anyone with a speedy gazetteer

Tom Hughes tom at compton.nu
Mon Jan 12 14:42:52 GMT 2009


Milo van der Linden wrote:

> I strongly suggest that you read the postgresql text search[1] chapter 
> in depth. You will find that a lot of textual and multilingual 
> confusions can be solved with that function set. the name "text search" 
> is by far too simple for what it covers...

I have read it, and it's not at all clear it can be made to work right.

The basic problem is that it assumes that all text in a given field is 
in the same language - you can give it a set of language specific rules 
to use when parsing a the record data and when parsing the query but you 
can't vary that on a record by record basis.

Though even if you could you wouldn't know what language the query was 
in anyway, so you wouldn't know how to parse it...

I have actually been playing with using Postgres for this, using 
osm2pgsql to load planet data into a gazetteer with Postgres text search 
for name matching and a spatial index for location matching. I wound up 
sticking to using the "simple" text parsing ruleset in the end.

Tom

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




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