[OSM-talk] Namefinder syntax

[David Earl]

Just to take us away again from the rather specific topic of place name 
searching to generalise a bit, I am toying with the idea of making the 
search less syntactic (albeit it is a simple somewhat naturalistic 
syntax at present) and more analytic (based on context) to try to 
determine exactly what it is you're looking for. The "Washington, D.C." 
example is a classic with the comma and periods that people will 
naturally type and I think I should be able to cope with.

The most common search is for just a place name, but people also put in 
full street addresses, or qualify by US state (as this is a common thing 
to do linguistically, "Portland, ME", but is well-nigh impossible to do 
from the data just in in OSM at present) and so on.

To this end can I ask for crowd source help again.

I'd like to gather together a collection of street address formats from 
around the world. Some countries put house numbers after the street 
name, some put postcodes before the town name and so on.

Could you add examples from your own countries to this page please:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Name_finder/Address_format

Thanks,
David

PS Thank you to everyone who has added to the translations page 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Name_finder:Translations
Italian is a notable absentee so far in European languages (Norwegian 
among others is also missing). But we're really short on non-latin 
languages: Russian, Chinese, Japanese, indo-chinese languages, Hebrew, 
Arabic, Hindi and so on.