On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 02:30:33AM -0400, Dustin Spicuzza wrote:
Whats the best way to facilitate users downloading places by name, as opposed to specifying coordinates?The Namefinder can be used as a web service, i.e. it can output the results in some XML format. See [1] for details.
[Names and POIs]
How do you go about searching for these items and downloading them, or can they only be downloaded in the bulk downloads?You can easily request single objects from the API. Since the Namefinder returns some location data, you might not need it anyway, though.
Does OSM store street number data... ie, if I wanted to find the coordinates for 123 Any St, does OSM support this?We are starting to record house numbers, but search support for these is quite limited currently. I don't know of any implementation supporting house numbers that could use a planet dump (instead of just some small excerpt) on a regular computer.
AFAIK also very limited. As I gather it, there are (at least in Germany and UK) no free sources for the post code polygons and we have a hard time generating them. There has been some import from OpenGeoDB that contains post codes, but only on nodes. This could be used to differentiate locations in different parts of a country (so it's already quite useful), but not within a city. And yes, differentiating between streets with the same name in nearby locations is very important. We once drove to fetch a patient (luckily it wasn't an emergency), but there wasn't even a house at the given address. Turned out the doctor had named the wrong suburb (those two are directly adjoining, easy to get it wrong). Granted, in this case the name was wrong, not the post code, but you get the idea. :)Zip/postal code support?
What about city/state/country boundaries? Is there a way to search/download these via the API?These are often incomplete or nonexistant, but we continue on improving them. :) Especially for cities (and towns etc.) there's also some confusion on how to record what kind of border. The administrative one is hard to acquire (at least here in Germany), but for searching and routing other kinds are more important, namely the area covering all lots belonging to that city address-wise and the area defining speed etc. restrictions for vehicles. These three are mostly independent and there's commonly no consensus with regard to how to tag each of it. Some do it this way, others that way.
As for an API to work with OSM data, there are some Perl modules in SVN. Don't know what these do, though, since I tend to go to quite some extent to avoid some languages (namely PHP, Perl and Java).
[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Namefinder CU Sascha -- http://sascha.silbe.org/ http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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