[Geocoding] Namefinder future

Brian Quinion openstreetmap at brian.quinion.co.uk
Mon Dec 14 14:40:52 GMT 2009


> I'd much rather be in a position where
> we are co-operatively working together to produce a better collective
> result than in competition with Brian, and there are so many other
> things I can and am doing that Namefinder is never going to bubble to
> the top if I can't see a good reason for it.

Personally although I'd like to be co-operating I think it is a very
healthy thing for the project that there are competing projects
utilising the data in different ways.  I would be disappointed if
namefinder went away - as you say there are areas where is has better
features and multiple approaches are definitely a good thing.

> I don't know what the code status of Nominatim is. Is it in svn? Is it
> GPL or similar. There doesn't seem to be a wiki page describing it or
> how it works. Brian, would you welcome other contributions or is it
> something you want to keep to yourself?

I would welcome other contributions, more than anything I would
welcome another developer to discuss things with!  Like yourself I've
had various people express an interest but as yet I've had no active
code contributors (lots of people helping with other related stuff,
testing, etc.).  There is also a problem that the code is still quite
messy and development has been somewhat chaotic so far because it has
been limited to my free time.

BTW - the code is intended to be GPL, although I note that I've not
included a license saying so as yet.  I'll resolve this shortly.

> I think we should now remove Namefinder from the OSM search results, as
> it's incomplete index is clearly unhelpful and counter-productive. We
> can then free up the machine it runnuing on as well, maybe make it
> available for Nominatim or other things.

If the intent is to discontinue Namefinder I wonder if it might be
worth at least attempting to rebuilding the index without the active
load (searches) on the server?  Previously this wasn't possible
because it would have left OSM without any search but Nominatim could
certainly fill in for the time being while the index was being
rebuilt.  Would you be up for trying this?  Hopefully an up to date
service would attract more development interest.

Cheers,
--
 Brian




More information about the Geocoding mailing list