[OSM-talk] problems with nominatim

[Craig Wallace]

On 13/01/2010 20:45, Stan Berka wrote:
> I have problems with Nominatim search. If I search for "saint clare
> church, Portland, Oregon, United States of America", I get no results.
> If I change the search to "... Portland, Washington ...", I get the
> correct result. And as you can guess the result suggests that Portland
> is in Washington. Whom do I contact to correct this?

Note if you're using Nominatim at http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ 
you can click on the details link to see how it figured out the address.
eg for that church: 
http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/details.php?place_id=64749399
You can see that the Washington is from a node for a place=county named 
Washington, to the south of Portland (as opposed to Washington state).

I've noticed similar strange behaviour for place=county nodes, with them 
seeming to cover large areas, even if there are already 
boundary=administrative ways/relations there.
I suspect its the same problem reported here, for Dumfries and Galloway 
/ Workington: http://trac.openstreetmap.org/ticket/2507

Though I don't know how Nominatim calculates such areas, or how this 
could be fixed.
The best solution would be to draw ways / relations for all counties, to 
replace the nodes, but that isn't always practical.

Craig