can be useful ...............

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Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:06:02 +0100 From: Brian Quinion openstreetmap@brian.quinion.co.uk To: OpenStreetMap Geocoding geocoding@openstreetmap.org Subject: [Geocoding] New geocoder test system

Hi,

After several false starts the goecoding tool I've been working on seems to have succeeded in indexing the full planet file and it is now available for people to experiment with here:

http://katie.openstreetmap.org/~twain/

Data is from 2 weeks ago (approx.) and will remain as is for a week or so so people can try things after which I'll be using it as a test system to try importing the daily diff files.

There are still several known problems: 1) No suggestion for miss-spelt words I have code that produces suggestions but have not yet written the interface for it.

2) Ordering of citys / towns by size This is currently disabled because it is taking too long to index for the planet. I hope to bring it back online shortly.

3) Filtering by viewbox Currently broken and disabled (again)

4) Ordering of POI by distance It finds the 10 nearest points (pub, station, whatever) but then re-sorts them into an arbitrary order. It's an apples and oranges problem caused by trying to order the points by a combination of distance and importance and I'm still working on it.

5) 'more' At the moment the code only shows up to 10 results and there is no way to get more.

6) wrong name translation shown Where the feature has names in other languages but not in the local language (i.e. 'name:cy', but no 'name:en' only 'name') it can end up showing the wrong version of the name. This is because I've not been able to find a list of default languages for each country - if anyone knows of such a list this is easily fixed!

7) Repetition in search results Hopefully this is mostly fixed however some repetition is still present where a road is in multiple areas / postcodes or where the data is actually duplicated in OSM (I've avoided hiding the OSM duplication so that problems can be found and fixed rather than just hidden).

Please report other bugs to me either using the reporting tool built into the site, by email or on IRC in #osm-geocoding. Before reporting problems with addresses place check how the address was created using the 'details' link next to each search result. The best way to improve address information is to either create administrative boundaries or convert places points into place areas (otherwise it has to resort to 'nearest' which is always going to have problems).

In addition to HTML view results can also be retrieved in xml or json format by adding 'format=xml' or format=json paramater to the url, for example:

http://katie.openstreetmap.org/~twain/?format=xml&q=london

Feedback and bug reports, particularly regarding problems with non-english searching appreciated. -- Brian

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