Hacker News Reader

Comment by ancymon | Hacker News Reader

From programmer's point of view working with OSM is quite annoying. OSM is being considered more as database than drawn map. But that database is inconsistent, contains many errors and its data structures are not good to represent non geographical items. On top of that mechanical edits of map are very discouraged. I think that OSM would only be good for simple stuff like showing on your website where's your business located. Anything more advanced like address searching or routing would never work reliably.

View on HN

I think you'll find that there are plenty of companies making lots of money selling services on top of OSM's "inconsistent" data. Mapbox sells an extremely powerful map styling system, geocoding/searching, and routing. Mapzen sells similar services. MapQuest offers services using OSM data. Apple Maps uses OSM data in areas where commercial data isn't available.

I think you'll find that OSM is great for more than just simple stuff. In fact using and contributing to it is a million dollar industry.

Mapzen isn't selling anything.

True 'nuf. I suppose I meant "selling" in terms of promoting, not dollar bills.

Not at all. Plenty of people, myself included, route with OSM data.

Address searches are possible though, as ever, it depends whether contributors have added those addresses to OSM.

The flag OSM geocoder is Nominatim. It turns out it won't work if you provide only part of street name (if OSM contains full street name) or when you provide full name (if OSM contains only part of the name) [1]. So in my opinion searching for addresses is not reliable.

That's one thing, another is that addresses are quite often duplicated. There's no automatic check for that and such duplicates exist for years.

[1] - https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/45825/how-can-i-geo...

There are several geocoders available for OSM. To say that "the database is inconsistent [and] contains many errors", and then back that up solely with a criticism of one piece of client software, makes no sense.

I've backed the statement that OSM contains errors by saying that there are duplicated addresses.

I've backed the statement that OSM is inconsistent by saying that sometimes streets in OSM contain full name and sometime only most important part (and that makes Nominatim unable to search for addresses).

I agree, we started looking at OSM's address data sets only to find them pretty sparse. For the areas we investigated I'd estimate around 5% coverage from community efforts. Made me wonder why nobody's done something stupid like grab the files from http://openaddresses.io and create a reasonable starting point? But that got me thinking why even bother with Nominatim vs just throwing all that data into elastic for better fuzzy searches or match.

Mapzen is pretty much doing what you describe:

https://mapzen.com/blog/the-world-is-yours-announcing-mapzen...

Nominatim is the one I've always tried using, and it doesn't work very well. Can you recommend a better one?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com