[OSM-talk] Announcing name searches for OSM

[David Earl]

I have implemented a prototype for my long-proposed name searching. So it is
now possible to search for data in the OSM map by name in context.
  http://www.frankieandshadow.com/osm/
While you can search for e.g. 'High Street' as you could previously (and get
back potentially vast numbers of answers), the power of this search is that
you can qualify it by place: 'High Street, Chesterton' to constrain the
results.

It also includes variants, so that if someone put 'High St' in the map and
you search for 'High Street' or vice-versa you'll still get a hit. Ditto
international names, so 'Londres' is found because it has a
'name:fr=Londres' tag (but e.g. Munich is not, because München doesn't yet
have a 'name:en=Munich'). Various letters such as ü and u are also
considered equivalent (all the latin1 characters have been equivalenced, but
there will be many in other languages I don't know about but can easily
add).

The whole thing works using distances, so these are reported in context for
the place, as well as showing it on the map. It tells you when the street
was found close to the place you asked for but another place was closer, and
also tells you the nearest town and/or city.

More details at
  http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Name_finder

Enjoy! Feedback welcome.

David