On 5 Oct 2010, at 00:38, Nic Roets wrote: > On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 12:46 AM, Ed Avis <[email protected]> wrote: >> So, is it possible for Mapquest to generate aggregate information on what >> name >> searches people are doing and how often they find the result they wanted? >> The >> latter is not something you can measure directly, but you can see which of >> the >> offered results the user clicks on, which gives a clue. > > The biggest problem I experience when searching with Nominatim for a > street is that you need to guess the place name that *it* has chosen. > For example, Hyperion Drive falls in a suburb (johannesburg North, I > think). The suburb falls in a region and the region falls in a city. > And the city falls in a province. Some of that information is already > in OSM as administrative borders. > > But end users seldom know where the borders are, so they will just > search for "hyperion, johannesburg" and not get an answer. (To get it, > search for "hyperion, roodepoort") Or they will be too lazy to type > the suburb.
Admin, town and city boundaries are in many ways hit and miss with nominatim, however that is generally through a lack of osm data. Or better said just having points, where it is difficult to estimate the size. For example according to Nominatim Surrey covers most of London http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/details.php?place_id=559111 (Which it doesn't really). By using Polygons for the boundaries in the osm data instead of simple points, it will be more likely to give a more accurate result. Another problem is that place names can be fuzzy, as one person will say place x will cover a certain area, however another person will say it covers a different area, yet officially that's wrong. Shaun _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
