“Geoname search and address geocoding are one of the most in-demand location based services. In this talk we focus on extracting geonames and building adress out of OSM and making it available for searching, which is a separate process. With geonames we mean administrative areas down to street level and even POIs. Building addresses along with streets and city names are the core of any geocoding dataset.

The OpenStreetMap data coverage is not yet complete, but already good enough. The challenge to extract these objects is manifold: Geonames need a importance (rank), a bounding box, and a hierarchical structure up to state level. And building addresses require a street and a city name, even if it it’s missing in the original node.

This talks tries to give a better understanding of those challenges, and how e.g. Nominatim and OSMNames cope with it. Finally, the talk also gives hints to mappers in order to arrive at a better OpenStreetMap dataset in the medium and long term.”