[OSM-talk] Nominatim & US places

[Richard Welty]

i'm not getting a strong sense of an architecture for getting this
data into Nominatim in a useful way, just a bundle of opinions
about specific details.

it's not really leading anywhere, in part due to the fact that
noone from Nominatim has spoken up. i did just review the
Nominatim stuff i found in the wiki. they want postal code
polygons in the database; in the US this is the extremely iffy
zip code boundary stuff that probably shouldn't go in. i think
there are some architectural issues to be resolved, but this is
a pretty awful forum for that sort of thing especially given
the absence of the Nominatim folks themselves from the
discussion.

but i did find a workaround. i added

is_in=Averill Park, NY, US

to Biittig Road and the Nominatim lookup now does what
would normally be expected. in fact, for one of the
homesites i've tagged with proper address data:

214 Biittig Road, Averill Park, NY US

goes to the right spot, which it wasn't before (Nominatim
ignores a bunch of the karlsruhe schema tagging on buildings
for performance reasons; see the wiki. i had previously entered
complete data on the building, but it was never going to find it
based on that data alone).

it still displays Sliters, Saratoga. even if i fix the Rensselaer County
Boundary, it'll just display 214, Biittig Road, Sliters, Rensselaer, 12018
so roundtripping using expected addresses isn't really there.

what i still don't get is how it figures out the correct zip code of 12018
for the displayed result string, i guess there's some research to be
done yet.

how does this differ from zip code boundaries? it does
so in several regards:

1) it's more painful to enter, as instead of importing
polygons we would need to identify and mark roads
with what post office city/town/whatever address is
involved (and break ways where boundaries are crossed).

2) it's a little easier in that some postal city designations
in the US (mostly for larger towns/cities) encompass many
zip codes, and we wouldn't have to deal with that (this is,
i think, where the boundaries are iffy in any case.) you end
up not worrying about the multitude of zip codes that
Albany, NY involves, for example.

richard