[OSM-talk] Nominatim & US places

[john whelan]

I raised the issue of Canadian post code support some time ago and some
changes appear to have been made to Nominatim to use a North American site
for Canadian post code and I think for the full US postal services Zip code.

Try a long US zip code and see what happens.

Cheerio John

On 30 December 2010 15:33, Richard Welty <rwelty at averillpark.net> wrote:

>  [this got no response on talk-us, so i'm trying talk]
>
> i'm trying to understand some of what's going on with Nominatim and
> US places.
>
> specifically, in trying to look up a local road name here in NY, i'm
> curious
> about why Nominatim does what it does, and whether there are changes
> that need to be made in the map data, or changes perhaps in how Nominatim
> interprets the map data.
>
> the specific example i'm using here is Biittig Road in the Town of Sand
> Lake,
> NY:
>
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=42.61507&lon=-73.59512&zoom=15&layers=M
>
> postal addresses on Biittig will be in Averill Park, NY. this is how a
> normal
> user would probably try to look it up. it fails.
>
> what works are either of these two strings:  "Biittig Road, NY" and
> "Biittig Road, Sliters, NY"
>
> Sliters is a tiny unincorporated hamlet a mile or so south of Biittig Road,
> and it
> is probably the nearest such from the gnis import. it's not really correct
> for any
> postal addressed based lookups, and i think very few would ever try to look
> it up
> that way. they'll try "Biittig Road, Averill Park, NY" get nothing and
> decide the
> whole thing sucks. we should probably attempt to provide a slightly better
> user experience.
>
> the displayed results from Nominatim are curious as well:
>
> Unclassified Road Biittig Road, Sliters, Saratoga, 12018, ニューヨーク州, United
> States of America<http://www.openstreetmap.org/?minlon=-73.6051635742188&minlat=42.612548828125&maxlon=-73.5850830078125&maxlat=42.6175994873047>
>
> I'm not at all clear on why Saratoga is showing up at all. Saratoga County
> is a bit
> north and west of here; Biittig Road is in Rensselaer County (note that i
> did just
> fix some county border issues with Rensselaer County, it was mislabled
> Franklin County when it was imported, and the admin_level was missing
> from one segment. i need to go look at the eastern border with
> Massachusetts,
> i think that's wrong for Rensselaer County as well. i did these lookups
> before i
> made the corrections, and i don't know how rapidly changes like this impact
> Nominatim.)
>
> can someone involved in the Nominatim comment on this, and what needs to be
> done either on the map data side or the Nominatim side to get results that
> are more consistent with what an ordinary user-off-the-street might be
> expecting?
>
> richard
>
>
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>
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