We are happy to announce a new release 4.2.0 of Nominatim. This release brings two new experimental features: importance ranking for all places and support for osm2pgsql’s flex output.

Importance classification of places is used by Nominatim to properly rank search results and bring the most likely matches on top. The current importance classification based on Wikipedia page rankings is only available for selected objects that have a Wikipedia entry. The new secondary importance is derived from the position of a result and therefore available for all places.

osm2pgsql flex output is a new way of configuring the initial import of OSM data into the place table. The Lua configuration of the flex output will give Nominatim users much more flexibility in the future to control the input.

You may notice that the 4.2.0 version follows rather shortly after the 4.1.1 release. This is because there was a bit of a mixup when creating the tarball for the 4.1.1. release. Instead of packaging that version, it did contain the latest master version. This is not very problematic. The master version is functioning well (it’s what is running on https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org) and does not break anything in existing databases. If you have updated, you will notice though, that your database now reports a version of 4.1.99. This release brings you back in line with normal versioning.

Updating from any version between 3.6.x and 4.1.x to the new release is straightforward. Please follow the instructions from the migration guide.

Many thanks to @tareqpi, who developed the secondary importance feature during this year’s Google Summer of Code, and to Geofabrik, who financially support the development of the flex output.