[Geocoding] Thanks to nominatim sysadmin [Re: Apologies for over-use; Any other corrections to take?

[Howard.Abbey at awtcus.com]

Hello again,

I wanted to give a public thanks to Sarah H., the sysadmin of 
nominatim.osm.org, for the extra information and help.

Regards,
Howard
-- 
AW Technical Center U.S.A., Inc.

----- Forwarded by Howard Abbey/AWTC  -----

From:   Howard Abbey/AWTC
To:     geocoding at openstreetmap.org, 
Date:   06/18/2014 11:12 AM
Subject:        Apologies for over-use; Any other corrections to take?


Hello,

If this should be directed to another mailing list and/or person, please 
let me know.

Thanks much, apologies, and thanks in advance.

Thank you much for Nominatim, and for allowing it to be used beyond just 
powering openstreetmap.org

Apologies that an app under development inappropriately overused the 
Nominatim interface.
I am sorry we did not notice this sooner. 
We will switch to another server.  Is there any other step to take?

Thanks in advance for all the work that I look forward to seeing in the 
future.  Hopefully our work will also help advance OpenStreetMap in some 
way (such as wider acceptance).


[Details]
We made a prototype web application, for mainly internal testing, and were 
doing geocoding via Nominatim for interactive address searches in it.  The 
volume was minimal for testing.
Then we implemented searches for another source that did not have built in 
lat /long, and tied into the existing address look-up module.  (That 
source has no relationship with us, but had an API that was available.)
We forgot that the 10 to 20 address look-ups very quickly would violate 
the Nominatim usage terms of 1/ second, and put more load on the community 
server than intended. 
[[Image removed]]

As is often the case, we did not notice our error / misuse until something 
broke.  The Nominatim usage for searches from our corporate gateway IP 
became throttled after some relatively heavy testing before a planned 
demo.

We are in process of switching to the Mapquest API.
The motivation in large part behind this e-mail is to avoid a complete IP 
ban.  Our corporate web gateway IP is ...
Once we are switched to another server the ban would not effect our 
prototype, but we are likely to do other spot checks in the future with 
Nominatim directly.


Thanks again to twain and all who keep Nominatim, and all of OSM, working.

Regards,
Howard
-- 
AW Technical Center U.S.A., Inc.