[OSM-dev] Nominatim Special Phrases and improving search

Brian Quinion openstreetmap at brian.quinion.co.uk
Tue Dec 7 17:38:47 GMT 2010


Hi,

I'm changing how Nominatim handles the special phrases which are used
to search for particular key=value pairs.

Up until now these phrases have been imported from the translatewiki
but this is now turning out to be to limited - in particular regarding
the ability to capture the differences between phrases that should
search for things 'near' somewhere, or 'in' somewhere or 'named'
something.  There are also problems with capturing the different
plural version of words and the different language forms.

As a result of all this I've now moved the these phrases into the wiki
as a set of tables - one table/page per language.  The base page
(which links to all the currently languages) and contains a full
explanation can be found here:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim/Special_Phrases

In a lot of cases these pages have been machine generated with very
little understanding of the particular languages and will contain
numerous errors and omissions so at this point I'm now looking for
volunteers to go through these pages and fix them up, or indeed to add
completely new languages.  I'm afraid its a fairly boring and
repetitive task - I should know I've been correcting the English
language version myself - but it is something which can result in a a
significant improvement of the search system.

Please feel free to copy or translate this message onto any of the
other mailing lists.

Many thanks for any assistance!

--
 Brian



More information about the dev mailing list