Nominatim Blog
Happy new year
Jan 2, 2021
The end of last year saw the release of the 3.6.0 version of Nominatim. It concludes last years effort to improve the address information that is returned to you when you search for something. We have gradually changed how Nominatim organises address information and how it interprets information on OSM place nodes and administrative boundaries. The new system also takes into account that today the existence of administrative boundaries is rather the norm in OSM than the exception. When the original code was written years ago, this was still different. There is still some work to do to look through the data of each country and adapt the ranking system now in place to the local customs but these are more smaller changes we can do gradually.
Place nodes and boundaries
Nov 11, 2020
Geocoding doesn’t just mean to throw a number of place names into a database and then search for them. To make search truly useful, the geocoder needs to add some context to each place, commonly referred to as the place’s address. In the past year, we have gradually reworked how Nominatim determines the address of a place going from an unstructured to a more structured approach. This post describes how the new algorithm works and what that means for the places you have mapped in OSM.
Weekly country extracts for Photon
Oct 21, 2020
The download server for Photon now offers ready-to-use database dumps for over 200 countries. Setting up your own geocoding server was never easier.
Nominatim and the address tags
Oct 7, 2020
OpenStreetMap has a well defined schema how to add addresses into the
database. There is a whole set of addr:* tags
that allow to specify every part of the address in a structured way.
When mappers have entered such an address, they naturally expect to be able
to search their place later by entering exactly the same terms in the
search box. Sometimes they are disappointed.
Quo Vadis
Sep 14, 2020
This year Nominatim celebrates its 11th birthday. On Nov 11th 2009 the OpenStreetMap (OSM) homepage used Nominatim as its main search engine for the first time. Since then OSM has grown enormously and with it the need for a geocoder based on OSM data. The OSM Nominatim servers alone now serve more than 30 million queries per day. In addition, there are many private installations out there.