Hacker News Reader

Comment by freddie_mercury | Hacker News Reader

Just another reply saying "OSM is completely useless where I live".

If I enter my street address into Google Maps, it shows my house. If I enter it into OSM it says "No results found" and can't even figure out what country or city I am in.

View on HN

Just out of curiosity, have you looked into what data is missing? Is the house (or at least the street) mapped, but missing the street name or the house number (assuming you live somewhere where these are relevant), or is the street completely missing?

OSM doesn't support/understand the street numbering scheme used in my country. If I rewrite my address in the format OSM thinks I should be using, then at least it can find the street I am on. But I'm not going to write addresses differently just for one website...especially when Google Maps understands how we write addresses.

Hi, I'm a long time OSMer, and I'd like to help. OSM has a flexible tagging system, so it could be possible to map your addresses the way they should be. You shouldn't have to shoe-horn things into a schema that doesn't fit you.

Which country are you in?

I am in Vietnam. Here are the problems:

Addresses here are written like "220/9 xo viet nghe tinh", which means "go to 220 on Xo Viet Nghe Tinh and turn into the alley there, go to #9 in the alley".

Typing "220/9 xo viet nghe tinh" into OSM results in "No results found". Instead I have to write "hem 220/9 xo viet nghe tinh" for it to find the road; no one writes it that way.

A house address would be "220/9/14 xo viet nghe tinh" meaning "go to 220 on Xo Viet Nghe Tinh and turn into the alley there; go to #9 and turn into the next alley you find there; then go to house #14".

The only way OSM can figure things out is if I write it like "14 hem 220/9 xo viet nghe tinh"

You mean the search box doesn't handle it well?

How does https://photon.komoot.de/ do?

Yes, it works. Well, it is missing the location but it at least understands the format. What is it doing differently from the OSM site?

It's different software.

openstreetmap.org uses Nominatim:

https://github.com/openstreetmap/Nominatim

The photon link uses Photon:

https://github.com/komoot/photon

Nominatim processes OSM data, associating items of interest with features like town boundaries that enclose the item, or place markers that are nearby, and then is also a fairly pedantic search interface for that data.

Photon takes the data that Nominatim generates and sticks a more flexible search on top of it.

Checking for/creating an issue for Nominatim describing the address format that doesn't work well would be a useful thing to do, as global support is a goal there.

At least you were given the chance of improving it. You declined to do so, but that's your decision.

In a similar situation with Google Maps, you wouldn't even have been given the opportunity.

You can add missing places (including private property) to Google Maps, but I've never had an issue where I needed to do that.

Because everyone implicitly forced for improving the maps via a bullsh*t named captcha.

That’s not an extremely compelling argument. I could host a web-based persistent infinite bitmap canvas where anyone can draw anything they want, and that would still be a much worse map than Google Maps despite the fact that the friction to contribute is as low as it could be.

> You declined to do so, but that's your decision.

This kind of patronizing attitude is unnecessary and silly. The vast majority of users of any software product are only interested in being just that: users. And that's totally okay. No need for passive-aggressive shaming.

The vast majority who make use of OSM data probably aren't even aware of what Open Street Map is, nor that they can contribute data to such a thing, or of how they could do so.

After re-reading my own comment, I agree and am sorry. I meant to put the emphasis on "your decision", in order to highlight the freedom argument for OSM. I realise it totally sounded like the emphasis was on "you declined", which makes it a personal attack, and that was never intended nor necessary.

Again, sorry.

Good on you, you're a better commenter-person than I am.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com