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Comment by 188201 | Hacker News Reader

The problem with OpenstreetMap based map is that there are no good reversed geocoding to search locations. For example, Osmand app is perfectly fine to use except I can't search location by postal code. Pasting the address does not work and searching only the street name leading to multiple city with same street name.

What I am doing now is searching the location in Google, getting the coordinate and searching the coordinate in OSM for offline map. A pretty dumb workaround but nothing can beat Google's resources on refining their map.

If this project aimed to be the consumer version of openstreetmap, then I would claim that reversed geocoding is the first thing that need to be fixed.

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Is that not what this very article describes?

> Mimirsbrunn (or simply Mimir) is the search engine of Qwant Maps. It allows to search for the following "punctual" geospatial objects: addresses, administrative areas and points of interest. It is a web service of geocoding (or more precisely geoparsing) that matches the user unstructured text query with a specific point (or area) on the map (i.e. a latitude and a longitude). The complexity of the problem is to disambiguate user requests. The roots of this ambiguity are numerous. First of all there are a large number of possible interpretations in the world for a given mention of a place: the difficulty is to choose the most "relevant" interpretation. Then there is the natural ambiguity due to the natural language: the user often looks for a place whose the exact spelling is not necessarily known.

How does Mimirsbrunn differ from Pelias? https://pelias.io

Both are geocoders using OpenStreetMap data and backed with Elasticsearch. The main difference is how they handle geographical context, eg to determine in which city/region each place is located. Which is useful both for indexing the data and producing human-readable labels.

Pelias is using its own gazeteer (https://whosonfirst.org/) to index locations and remarkable zones. Whereas Mimirsbrunn relies only on OSM data for this task using Cosmogony (https://github.com/osm-without-borders/cosmogony), a tool that extracts official administrative boundaries and other shapes from OSM data. But the world is a complicated place, and OSM tagging scheme doesn't always lend itself to geocoding purposes. So it comes with a lot a caveats which are still being working on :)

Thanks! I can see how using Cosmogony can make sense if Who's on First is too complex but I'm afraid OSM doesn't have enough coverage of administrative boundaries. The boundaries are mostly not visible in the physical world and thus cannot be mapped in the traditional sense.

I wonder if there's an open catalog of boundary data analogous to https://openaddresses.io/

Search by postcode (or address) would be geocoding not reverse geocoding.

Reverse geocoding takes a location and returns an address.

> The problem with OpenstreetMap based map is that there are no good reversed geocoding to search locations.

Yes, this problem does exist. Ultimately, probably Google is the best entity in the world that can map search queries to the stuff you want, but qwant maps adopting mimirsbrunn seems like an improvement from my testing.

And this problem will continue to exist if people continue to use Google Maps. You need a large amount of data (the map search queries of the user and geolocation data as you travel while using the map app) to refine and improve this. But new map apps will initially offer a poor user experience as they can only improve once people start using it. But people stop using these apps because of the poor user experience. And thus the gap between Google Maps and others keep growing as people continue to use Google Maps, and keep giving it more data and ignore the other map apps.

That is why Apple has now begun to collect geolocation data from even other apps ( https://thenextweb.com/apple/2019/06/10/ios-13-will-show-you... ) in the guise of "transparency" - the data is really to improve their own map apps

> the data is really to improve their own map apps

Baselessly claiming Apple silently uploads locally collected data is quite a leap of imagination on your end, do you have a source for the uploading part?

It's not that big of a leap of imagination when you realise that the data is shown to the user on an Apple Map and that Apple has been collecting location data since iPhone was launched, in many different ways.

- Apple is collecting location data, but not YOUR location data ( https://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobi... ).

- Apple tweaks privacy policy to juice location tracking ( https://www.imore.com/apple-posts-qa-location-data )

(Note the dates on these articles).

Moreover, all this "feature" of collecting data on app usage through "screen time" or the feature of getting location data from other apps to "inform" the user is just a very reasonable excuse by them to collect more data and profile you, in the guise of "transparency".

Having trusted Google once with a similar "Do No Evil" propaganda of how trustworthy they are, and ultimately been betrayed by them, I can recognize that Apple is following the same pattern as Google - collecting more and more data followed with a PR campaigns about how they "care" about a privacy. But despite all this PR about "transparency" note that there is no way to opt-out of any such data collection and sharing!

(No, I am not an Apple basher - I have and use their products and actually advocated for it a lot with others. Still do under some circumstances. But I am losing faith in them ... ).

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