[OSM-talk] Cannot find address ringvegen 45 Sørkjosen in nominatim

[Sarah Hoffmann]

On Mon, Aug 24, 2020 at 07:28:42AM +0200, Maarten Deen wrote:
> On 2020-08-23 22:20, Sarah Hoffmann wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > On Sun, Aug 23, 2020 at 09:41:10PM +0200, Maarten Deen wrote:
> > > Node 3117603944 was established in 2014 with tags
> > > addr:city 	Sørkjosen
> > > addr:housenumber 	45
> > > addr:postcode 	9152
> > > addr:street 	Ringvegen
> > > 
> > > Yet, when I query nominatim for Ringvegen 45 Sørkjosen I get no
> > > results.
> > > 
> > > What is going wrong here? Sørkjosen itself is found [2] so the
> > > problem does
> > > not seem to lie in the special character (I wouldn't have thought
> > > so). Also
> > > found is the street which is named Ringveien [3] in OSM. No idea why
> > > the
> > > street is called different than the address node, but does Nominatim
> > > not
> > > index address nodes?
> > 
> > Nominatim only indexes addresses of streets and then searches for
> > address nodes based on the address of the street they are attached
> > to.
> > 
> > In that particular example, the housenumber got attached to Hovedvegen
> > because Nominatim could not find a 'Ringvegen' and used the nearest
> > street:
> > https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ui/details.html?osmtype=N&osmid=3117603944
> 
> Just one question though (well two acutally): why does it find Hovedvegen as
> nearest street and not Reingveien
> https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ui/details.html?osmtype=W&osmid=282670088
> ?

Hovedvegen is closer. Nominatim computes distance in WSG84 while you look at a
Mercator map. That far north there is a significant distortion between the two.

> And would it be an idea to make some kind of fuzzy matching when searching
> for names? Like "it is better to take a street which has just one different
> letter then one where all differ"?

This is about consistency between addr:street and names on highways. I think
it is much better to fix the OSM data in this case. Nominatim has always taken
a stance to rather expose mapping issues than trying to work around them.

Sarah