CODEWITHSUNDEEP
openstreetmapnominatim
Adam Baranyai
Adam Baranyai

Reputation: 3867

Where does Nominatim get its address info?

Till now, I was using the Nominatim API to fetch landmark information from but recently, I've downloaded the OpenStreetMaps database, and tried to make my own dataset, so I would not rely so heavily on Nominatim services. I managed to extract from the OSM database the needed information (nodes tagged with amenity for example), but I realized, that while I was querying for amenities through Nominatim, it returned a bunch of address info, which is nowhere to be found in the OSM database.

Example:

Reverse geocoding of a hotel from Spain using Nominatim: http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/reverse?format=xml&osm_type=N&osm_id=1207098527

The data that is attached to the same node used to reverse geocode in OSM: http://open.mapquestapi.com/xapi/api/0.6/node/1207098527

While Nominatim gives me Suburb, Pedestrian, City, County, State, etc. information, this node in OSM contains only a name tag, and a tourism tag.

Does anyone know, where is Nominatim getting the additional data it uses to display its information from?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2072

Answers (1)

scai
scai

Reputation: 21469

Nominatim does not just look at individual objects but gathers information from multiple objects instead. Look at the information Nominatim knows about "HOTEL LA MORADA MAS HERMOSA": There are:

... and so on.

Remember, OSM is a spatial database. Instead of attaching all information to each individual object one can do spatial queries in order to gather various kinds of additional information.

Upvotes: 3

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