[OSM-talk] State of the NameFinder

[Brian Quinion]

> Preliminary results of the British Museum Test:
> http://povesham.wordpress.com/2007/11/23/the-british-museum-test-for-public-mapping-websites/

Thanks for all this - very interesting results.  I'll work my way
through them and track down the reasons for the various errors.  The
duplication is to be expected - at the moment there is no code to
prevent it - but I'll got some written given how significant a problem
it seems to be, it was less obvious with road searches.

> Another hint for priorities would be if something is in the current map,
> it should possibly score a bit higher than something further away
> (although anything in the current map area should score the same - you
> don't want to put a positive bias on The Midlands when searching while
> viewing the whole UK). This would have solved the "Natural History
> Museum, Hemel Hempsted" problem.

This is partially working, but currently turned off because it made
debuging harder and I forgot to turn it back on before posting to the
list. Ho, hum.

> Postcode searching is weird. If I search for NW1 3AN, it seems to give
> me the result for NW1 3AR, which isn't the same place. If it doesn't
> know the correct postcode, it should fall back to the area - NW1 3, for
> which is a better result because it's clear that it's not accurate and
> it's pointing to the whole area.

The system performs a weighted sum over all nearby postcodes which
seems to generate a fairly actuate result. In this case it is about 80
meters out, far better than a simple sector code search.  However it
then uses its standard address generation code to present the result
which is just confusing and odd.  I'll improve the output to try and
present the error range better.

Many thanks,
--
 Brian