OSMBuildings VS Nominatim

Maybe faux pas to reply to my own comment I made further connections with this.

I literally had cloned and was fixing OSMBuildings.org because, among other things, it wasn't clamping values correctly [1] -- it's why my charging markers are white. But I felt conflicted doing that. I was happy with what I spiked with OSMBuildings and started exploring commercial services like MapBox and a few other OSS projects.

Operating projects and companies and organizations is not easy. It sucks what happened there. I'm not a hater and actually looked to Patreon or similar Paul Norman -- and maybe the 'vector tiles' earmark literally means that? But, I'm not happy with that previous behavior of the organization...

So it's great the OSM Vector Tile service will be dramatically improved...

If any of us start doing something interesting with, will we get jacked up like OSMBuildings? Is that the stewardship of this donations? That's the rub.

[1] https://github.com/OSMBuildings/OSMBuildings/issues/230

One use of that data is creating 3d renders, like this site: https://osmbuildings.org/

The maintainer says it's not dead and the website still works, so... https://github.com/OSMBuildings/OSMBuildings/issues/252

You can simply use geopy API to get longitude and latitude from address. geopy includes geocoder classes for the OpenStreetMap Nominatim, Google Geocoding API (V3), and many other geocoding services. The full list is available on the Geocoders doc section. Geocoder classes are located in geopy.geocoders. Here…

I have had a lot of "fun" with this feature in the past. It has earned a permanent place in my setup script:

ALTER SYSTEM SET jit=off;

Basically a performance blackhole for more complex queries. Most OSM related projects disable it straight away as it only creates headaches.

https://github.com/osm-search/Nominatim/pull/2559

Because osm.org and OsmAnd use different search engines. On osm.org it uses the Nominatim geocoder which is good at parsing addresses the way we are used to writing them. It is also running on a server with a lot of storage and memory resources. OsmAnd is built for offline use so it can't use Nominatim and has much more limited computing resources available to it. It is searching through the map files locally on your phone and however they have chosen to implement that search algorithm seems to perform poorly on addresses.

Ako skupa s adresama imaš i njihove lokacije možeš i koristiti gotov geocoder (e.g. Nominatim je free i koristi OSM podatke, možeš i deployati svoju instancu), pa iz rezultata naći geometrijski najbližu adresu koju imaš.

Then implement a use case. We are going to use Geocoding use case with Nominatim provider. But you can, of course, use a different provider. Copy the example code into your server.js file and make a few changes, so we can send the information we will receive from the user:

There are reasons why this tech was developed: because GPS can take a long time to sync up to the satellites, because GPS often doesn't work indoors, because your phone can keep a local cache of locations, and so you have the ability to find places by name or address (Geocoding) using nominatim ( https://nominatim.org )

and nominatim which does the geocoding/reverse geocoding: https://nominatim.org/

Then it depends on how the location data is conveyed in the group chat. If it's a text message you need to parse it and possibly use a mapping service to do geocoding. Eg. convert "22 Main Street" or "upper Brooklyn" into GPS coordinates. Besides Google Maps API you can maybe use OpenStreetMaps via Nominatim. If it's something more like "we just passed John's house" then you need to figure out how to write some logic to determine a location from that. Or maybe they just used the WhatsApp location share feature, then you probably don't need mapping at all.