[OSM-talk] Nominatim & US places

[john at jfeldredge.com]

My guess (without having run a query) is that the Biitig Road entries in the database may not have any values tagged for town name and county name, and that Nominatim is using the values from the nearest noses that have those tags filled in.

-------Original Email-------
Subject :[OSM-talk] Nominatim & US places
From  :mailto:rwelty at averillpark.net
Date  :Thu Dec 30 14:33:30 America/Chicago 2010


[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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-- 
John F. Eldredge -- john at jfeldredge.com
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly
is better than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria