[OSM-dev] phonetic gazateer, would be cool feature for nominatim

[Brian Quinion]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 4:57 PM, Mikel Maron <mikel_maron at yahoo.com> wrote:
> In the Haiti response, someone asked about the Location of "Lilavois". That
> gets no results on most gazateers, except this one
> http://dma.jrc.it/services/gazetteer/?q=lilavois&cc=HA
> The place is actually called Lillavois (two L's). This gazateer searches
> phonetically.

I'd love to do something like this but have so far been unable to find
a suggest / phonetic algorithm that scales to 5.4 million
words/phrases across more than a hundered languages.  The geocoder you
mention doesn't seem to do street level - which simplifies the problem
by at least a couple of orders of magnitude.

If someone can provide an algorithm I'm even happy to code it but so
far I've had no luck in finding any way to do this.

--
 Brian