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

Nic Roets nroets at gmail.com
Tue Oct 5 08:23:10 BST 2010


On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 2:00 AM, Shaun McDonald
<shaun at shaunmcdonald.me.uk> wrote:
>
> 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.
>

That's a nice visual presentation. I guess it's generated by Fortune's
algorithm like Brian mentioned on dev.

The first problem with trying to get polygons for all places is that
surveying them can be quite labourious, if not impossible.

The second problem is that people, especially tourists and foreign,
don't speak like that. They often know only one placename, like
Johannesburg
http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/details.php?place_id=750446

IMHO, Gosmore handles the problem a little bit better: It first finds
the placename and then it will look for occurrences of the street
name, even if they are quite far from the place.

> 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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