[OSM-dev] Nominatim geocoding for Japanese address

[Sarah Hoffmann]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 09:09:21AM +0300, Jukka Rahkonen wrote:
> I have tried to help a user with an address related task on OSM
> forum http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=24757.
> 
> I found it quite hard to work with the admin boundary relations of
> OSM so I finally took the municipality borders as old fashion GIS
> polygons from the National Land Survey of Finland and after that
> sorting the unique streetnames by municipalities was very simple to
> do with a spatial SQL query.
> 
> As you work with Nominatim, don't you ever feel that there should be
> a separate OSM repository for administrative polygons?

This question comes up from time to time but the idea eventually
always gets rejected because we still don't have a general concept
how to work with multiple databases.

What I'd like to see is someone providing regular dumps of admin
boundaries as geojson or shapefiles, just like dumps are provided
for coastlines.

Sarah