[OSM-talk] OSM and MapQuest [was Hurricane hits MapQuest]

Shaun McDonald shaun at shaunmcdonald.me.uk
Tue Oct 5 01:00:51 BST 2010


On 5 Oct 2010, at 00:38, Nic Roets wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 12:46 AM, Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com> wrote:
>> So, is it possible for Mapquest to generate aggregate information on what name
>> searches people are doing and how often they find the result they wanted?  The
>> latter is not something you can measure directly, but you can see which of the
>> offered results the user clicks on, which gives a clue.
> 
> The biggest problem I experience when searching with Nominatim for a
> street is that you need to guess the place name that *it* has chosen.
> For example, Hyperion Drive falls in a suburb (johannesburg North, I
> think). The suburb falls in a region and the region falls in a city.
> And the city falls in a province. Some of that information is already
> in OSM as administrative borders.
> 
> But end users seldom know where the borders are, so they will just
> search for "hyperion, johannesburg" and not get an answer. (To get it,
> search for "hyperion, roodepoort") Or they will be too lazy to type
> the suburb.

Admin, town and city boundaries are in many ways hit and miss with nominatim, however that is generally through a lack of osm data. Or better said just having points, where it is difficult to estimate the size. For example according to Nominatim Surrey covers most of London http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/details.php?place_id=559111 (Which it doesn't really). By using Polygons for the boundaries in the osm data instead of simple points, it will be more likely to give a more accurate result.

Another problem is that place names can be fuzzy, as one person will say place x will cover a certain area, however another person will say it covers a different area, yet officially that's wrong.

Shaun




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