[OSM-talk-be] Addresses in Belgium

[Glenn Plas]

Sander/Jo

Lovely stats, but I don't really agree with all the conclusions, plenty 
of doubtful assumptions as well stated, but I will go along with those 
for a second.

I work professionally with OSM data, more specifically Nominatim for 
years now(2007/8), If you do not account for the house numbers, the 
results are far better than google(is)/yahoo(was).

The engines that perform the best reverse geocoding results in order :  
nominatim, google, yahoo, bing, ...rest

In reality the only thing that is preventing a full geocode (reverse) 
result is the missing housenumber.  The streets geocode fine, with 
better quality than the number 1  (google at this moment).  
Professionally I don't care too much for house numbers (albeit I 
understand the need for this in other applications of course).  All 
commercial ones have easter eggs everywhere, I found more than 20 this 
year in google, streets that don't exist so they can see if they get 
copied over.  These will be returned in geocode results.

So forgive me, but reading that I will only get 1 hit out of 40 is just 
not correct compared to reality.  I am able to geocode everything I 
throw at  nominatim,  I'm not talking about 1000 geocodes a week but 
millions (5 to 10).   Only 5 % is being relayed to a different engine 
since the DB I talk about is a Benelux OSM dump, not a full, so anything 
outside the benelux will be sent to external engines.

I would accept those numbers if you would state: "Getting back a full 
address including housenumbers will probably work 1 out of 40" But you 
WILL get an address back from Nominatim in all other cases, without a 
house number of course.

It surprises me a lot that I'm even in those top stats with a mere 111 
addresses added.... I don't think we can talk about a success in .BE 
looking at those totals.   But I do agree its improving, compared to 
2008 nominatim result sets.  it not only improved in source quality 
(OSM) but also implementation (so postal code is returned now, it didn't 
use to do that).

Happy holidays!

PS: I'm using a lot of geocoding when I truly mean 'reverse geocode',   
I only focus in getting full addresses back from coordinates.

Glenn