Sarah Hoffmann

Geocoders APIs are usually generalised to return results that are good enough for most people. In this talk we want to talk about how to create a geocoder that is specialized for your use case and returns results that are best for your users.

With the Nominatim geocoder we've been struggling for years to make sense of boundary and place data in the UK. In this session I want to start a discussion with the UK mappers about the current state of the data, and how it can be improved.

The OSM Foundation is kept running with the help of many volunteers. They look after our servers, the data, the community, the conference, membership and much more. In this session, some of our working groups will introduce themselves.

OpenStreetMap Foundation Board Ask Us Anything (i.e. AMA). We will take questions from the audience, or other questions that people can submit before the event, and we will talk about and answer them. We can talk about the past actions of the board, and what future plans we have.

The more detailed our mapping of the real world becomes, the more it becomes apparent that a single node, way or relation is insufficient to represent the complex properties of a real-word object. Streets have many lanes. Buildings have entrances, 3D shapes and POIs inside.

The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project is a community project to collect map data of the whole world. Started in 2007 as a small mapping project in the UK, it has become one of the most important providers of geodata.

It seems to be conventional wisdom that a search engine for geodata is best implemented with a text search engine like OpenSearch or Solr. Most of available open-source geocoders follow that wisdom. Nominatim is the odd one out.

OSM has an unrestricted tagging model. Mappers can invent and use any tags. While this is part of OSM's success story, it has lead to a database where the globe is described in ever greater detail.