My guess (without having run a query) is that the Biitig Road entries in the database may not have any values tagged for town name and county name, and that Nominatim is using the values from the nearest noses that have those tags filled in.
-------Original Email------- Subject :[OSM-talk] Nominatim & US places >From :mailto:[email protected] Date :Thu Dec 30 14:33:30 America/Chicago 2010 [this got no response on talk-us, so i'm trying talk] i'm trying to understand some of what's going on with Nominatim and US places. specifically, in trying to look up a local road name here in NY, i'm curious about why Nominatim does what it does, and whether there are changes that need to be made in the map data, or changes perhaps in how Nominatim interprets the map data. the specific example i'm using here is Biittig Road in the Town of Sand Lake, NY: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=42.61507&lon=-73.59512&zoom=15&layers=M postal addresses on Biittig will be in Averill Park, NY. this is how a normal user would probably try to look it up. it fails. what works are either of these two strings: "Biittig Road, NY" and "Biittig Road, Sliters, NY" Sliters is a tiny unincorporated hamlet a mile or so south of Biittig Road, and it is probably the nearest such from the gnis import. it's not really correct for any postal addressed based lookups, and i think very few would ever try to look it up that way. they'll try "Biittig Road, Averill Park, NY" get nothing and decide the whole thing sucks. we should probably attempt to provide a slightly better user experience. the displayed results from Nominatim are curious as well: Unclassified Road Biittig Road, Sliters, Saratoga, 12018, ニューヨーク州, United States of America <http://www.openstreetmap.org/?minlon=-73.6051635742188&minlat=42.612548828125&maxlon=-73.5850830078125&maxlat=42.6175994873047> I'm not at all clear on why Saratoga is showing up at all. Saratoga County is a bit north and west of here; Biittig Road is in Rensselaer County (note that i did just fix some county border issues with Rensselaer County, it was mislabled Franklin County when it was imported, and the admin_level was missing from one segment. i need to go look at the eastern border with Massachusetts, i think that's wrong for Rensselaer County as well. i did these lookups before i made the corrections, and i don't know how rapidly changes like this impact Nominatim.) can someone involved in the Nominatim comment on this, and what needs to be done either on the map data side or the Nominatim side to get results that are more consistent with what an ordinary user-off-the-street might be expecting? richard _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk -- John F. Eldredge -- [email protected] "Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
