photon

I wonder if this could help Photon, the open source ElasticSearch/OpenSearch search engine for OSM data. It's a mini-revolution in the OSM world, where most apps have a bad search experience where typos aren't handled. https://github.com/komoot/photon

AFAIK, a lot of the RAM requirements come from importing and processing the data. It already takes quite a long time and would be even slower without heavily utilizing RAM. Nominatim also doesn't support any sort of typeahead queries. There's Photon(https://github.com/komoot/photon), which works in concert with Nominatim and is similarly tied to OSM as a data source. There's also Pelias(https://pelias.io/), an open-source geocoder that handles all types of geocoding in one and supports OSM, OpenAddresses and many other sources (including custom data) out of the box. Admittedly it can have more moving parts as a result, but it can be set up with relatively little RAM if you're careful (I bet a planet install could be done somewhat slowly with 32GB RAM). Full disclosure, I have been a core-maintiner of the project since 2015.

The killer host-it-yourself component which mostly flies under the radar is Photon: https://github.com/komoot/photon I'm simplifying slightly, but it's essentially OSM's Nominatim geocoder data with a ready-to-download db, autocomplete capabilities, and a single .jar to install. If you're happy with the limitations of OSM's data (basically, patchy housenumber coverage) then it's easy and fast.

> Isn't this an ad for something you're selling? No. This is a demo of an open-source project that I've released for free. > To me it seems like something that has been around for a very long time and is now being resold under a new label of "geocoding" That's just what this class of software is called. https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/o... https://docs.mapbox.com/api/search/geocoding/ https://geocode.earth/ https://github.com/komoot/photon https://nominatim.org/ https://pelias.io/ https://www.here.com/platform/geocoding https://developer.tomtom.com/geocoding-api/documentation/geo... https://geocoding.geo.census.gov/geocoder/ https://github.com/Qwant/mimirsbrunn All of these call themselves geocoders. > 25 years ago tiny contained $100 GPS units had the entire US on a 2 GB flash card. Yeah! Super cool feat of eng

Like https://github.com/komoot/photon/ or https://github.com/pelias/pelias ?

Thanks for telling me about Photon! I see that it's provided by Graphhopper, who in my experience have been absolutely excellent with technical support about Map Matching. I wish I could choose a subset instead of 53GB for the whole world so I could run it on my phone, but it's certainly realistic to run on my laptop. https://github.com/komoot/photon

For a web mapping interface: * https://www.openstreetmap.org/ * https://wego.here.com/ * https://mapy.cz For maps on your phone: * Apple maps * https://maps.me/ * https://osmand.net/ * https://www.generalmagic.com/magic-earth/ * https://galileo-app.com/ For maps on your website, you'll probably have to combine a couple of services: * https://www.mapbox.com/ * https://opencagedata.com/ * http://www.thunderforest.com/ If you're willing to self-host: * https://github.com/komoot/photon * https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/blob/mas...

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.

> I assume I'd be using at least a day to set things up You assume wrong. :) It takes an hour or so to get a tileserver up and running with the switch2osm instructions. I've done it countless times. (You do then need to wait for the Postgres database to populate, but that's just fire-and-forget.) They're written for Ubuntu LTS versions so the "newer versions" issue doesn't arise. Or if Docker's your bag, you can get a ready-to-go image from openmaptiles: https://openmaptiles.com/server/ > where anyone can spin it up for $5/mo Not gonna happen. Running a worldwide map server needs a lot of (SSD) storage and decent CPU. I have a £10/month Hetzner VM just to do geocoding (with Photon: https://github.com/komoot/photon) so you aren't going to get a tileserver for half that - and that's no surprise; OSM is ultimately competing with Google, and

There's (justifiably) a lot of love for Mapbox in this thread as an alternative, but as remarked, their pricing isn't particularly cheap (why should it be, they sell on the quality of the product). So the other option is to self-host tools using OpenStreetMap data. Some pointers: * Raster tiled maps: the canonical instructions are at switch2osm.org; put it on commodity hardware such as Hetzner/OVH. * Vector maps: a lot of development in this area at the moment and you could happily lose yourself for days among all the emerging solutions, but probably the easiest out-of-the-box solution is openmaptiles.org. * Geocoding: Photon (https://github.com/komoot/photon) is the easiest to set up because it comes with precompiled indexes - no need to generate your own. Based on ElasticSearch, needs SSD for reasonable performance. * Routing: OSRM (Map

Photon builds nice, find as you type, free text search on top of OSM data: https://photon.komoot.de/ I wonder if GP is talking specifically about on device apps, Photon needs a pretty big index (31 gigabytes compressed): https://github.com/komoot/photon

Have you tried the Scout App (which the article is about)? How does its search work? I agree that geocoding has been a problem for OSM, especially for building numbers, where the data often isn't there. But on the software side there seems to be progress recently, for instance, here are two open-source geocoders released in the last few months: Photon, made by Komoot: https://github.com/komoot/photon, used in production at http://www.komoot.de/suggest/?&hl=en Pelias, made by Mapzen: http://stateofthemap.us/session/pelias/, live demo at http://mapzen.com/pelias/ On building numbers, we need geocoders which can interpolate between sparse data, and then use that system to highlight where the gaps are. People tend to add data to OSM when they're confident that it's actually being used, to its full extent. If there are a hundred buildings alon