We are happy to announce a new release 4.1.0 of Nominatim. After many months of stress testing in production, the ICU tokenizer introduced in the last release is now the default. The release also brings improved handling for house numbers and postcodes.

The 4.0 release saw one of the most extensive overhauls of the Nominatim code with the introduction of the ICU tokenizer. In the last months, we have stress-tested this code on the OSMF’s servers at https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org. There are no major incidents to report. The code did very well for the thousands of requests the servers get. Users did report smaller issues and suggestions for improvements, which we have continuously implemented in the last months. With this release the new code is ready for wider use and from now, will be used per default when you set up a new installation.

Using the flexible framework that the ICU tokenizer provides, the code now also has much improved handling of house numbers and postcodes. The addr:housenumber tag is checked for obvious errors. Postcodes are checked against the acceptable format of each country and discarded if they do not match. These changes greatly reduce the number of odd results that apparently do not fit a search query. Also, Nominatim no longer cares about spaces in house numbers and postcodes. That will make it a lot easier to find addresses.

If you already have a Nominatim database running, you can update to the latest release according to our migration instructions. However, to profit from the ICU tokenizer or the improved housenumber and postcode handling, a reimport is required.

Thank you again to OpenCage, Graphhopper and Komoot for their continued support of Nominatim’s development. If you are interested in supporting work on Nominatim, don’t hesitate to get in touch.