[OSM-talk] Nominatim & US places

[Richard Welty]

On 12/30/10 5:09 PM, Craig Wallace <craigw84 at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> I'm not involved in Nominatim, but some comments anyway:
> You can go to this page and search for a place:
> http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/
> In the results, click the little link for "Details", which will give
> more details of how Nominatim figured out the address. So for Biitig
> Road it gives this page:
> http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/details.php?place_id=14428803
> As you can see from that page, it is using the place=county node for
> Saratoga. If counties etc are just mapped as nodes, then Nominatim has
> to guess which county a place is in, based on which node is nearest. And
> in this example, the node for Saratoga county is nearer to Biitig Road
> than the node for Rensselaer county.
>
thanks for this info. i'll look into it after i get back to NY from
vacation.
> So its much more useful to map counties as areas/multipolygon relations,
> and delete the place=county nodes. If you have now done this, and its a
> complete border, and tagged correctly, then Nominatim should use it for
> the address.
> The same applies for cities/towns/villages etc - if they have defined
> boundaries, then its a good idea to map them instead of just a node.
>
> Have you got a link for the way/relation for Rensselaer County? I could
> have a look at it, and see if its tagged correctly and complete.
>
i'm pretty sure the way/relation is incomplete, the section which 
corresponds
to the NY/MA border is almost certainly not right. i was planning into
learning how those are supposed to be done if it turned out this was
contributing to the problem.

richard