Geocoding doesn’t just mean to throw a number of place names into a database and then search for them. To make search truly useful, the geocoder needs to add some context to each place, commonly referred to as the place’s address. In the past year, we have gradually reworked how Nominatim determines the address of a place going from an unstructured to a more structured approach. This post describes how the new algorithm works and what that means for the places you have mapped in OSM.

The address of a place has two functions in geocoding. It is very important to help narrow down a search: ‘I mean the Main St in Lyons, Colorado, not the one in Alta Loma, California.’ It is also used to present you a meaningful list of results so that you can choose the right one, just like the osm.org website does.

Finding possible candidates for an address is fairly easy. Just get the names of all places around your place of interest. Those very roughly correspond to the terms somebody might use to narrow down their search. To display the address, just string together all the names of the surrounding places. And indeed, in a nutshell, that’s what Nominatim has been doing for many years. It works but doesn’t always get you the best answer. The results can be long and contain irrelevant names. What you really want to do is build a structured address for your place, something of the form: ‘place A is in suburb B, city C, province P in country Neverland.’ With structured addresses we can format our results in the same way you would habitually put an address on a letter. That greatly improves readability. Structured addresses are also useful for finding the most relevant search. When looking for ‘Amalienstr, Karlsruhe’ it is much more likely that you mean the street in the city of Karlsruhe than the one in Ettlingen in the county of Karlsruhe.

Address context in the OpenStreetMap data

There are three features in OSM data that are suitable candidates for creating an address: address tags, place nodes and administrative boundaries. Address tags are simple and obvious to use. However, not each object in OSM has them, so a fallback is needed.

Place nodes are seemingly perfect for structured addressing. They have a name and a type: city, town, village etc. The problem is that reality turns out to be more messy and tagging in OSM is not universally consistent. Two place nodes of the same type do not necessarily translate to the same thing in a structured address. For example, place=village is usually used for independent small villages, but you’ll find it just as often being the suburb of a larger town. It makes sense from a mappers point of view. These ‘villages’ used to be independent until got ‘eaten up’ by the ever growing main town. They might still have their traditional village square and often are even referred to as ‘Village So-and-so’. It might quack like a village but it is still a suburb or neighbourhood in terms of addressing.

The other issue with place nodes is that they are point geometries without any information how far they extend. When two place nodes of the same type are close to the point of interest, Nominatim can only make an educated guess which one to include in the displayed address.

Administrative boundaries are nicer. They have a well defined area that clearly spells in or out1. They also have a clear hierarchy, the admin_level. Unfortunately, admin_levels are not easily assigned to a place type because there is no 1:1 relation between admin_levels and place types. Take for example Poland. The admin_level=6 in Poland usually designates a county. However, some cities like Warsaw or Krakow have a county status in terms of administration. They appear therefore on admin_level=6, while we would still like to designate them as a city in our structured address. This is not an unusual situation. In fact, cities with special status exist in almost every country on earth. Luckily, OSM has the habit of assigning both an administrative boundary and place nodes to many places, which makes it fairly easy to detect that particular situation.

Bringing structure into OSM tagging

This brings us to the algorithm that Nominatim uses to determine the structured address. This part is fairly technical, so feel free to skip over it.

Nominatim starts out with defining its own system for the address hierarchy, the address ranks. This is a numerical value between 4 and 30 which then can be translated back into a fixed part of a structural address. The smallest level 4 corresponds to a country, the largest level 30 designates a POI or housenumber. The documentation has a table of address ranks with the full list of translations into address function.

Next, each OSM object that can be used as address context, gets assigned an address rank like this:

  1. Take all administrative boundaries and assign them an address function based on the admin_level. There is a default assignment but if your country uses admin_level in a different way, Nominatim can change this assignment on a per-country basis.

  2. Try to match the boundaries with place nodes. Matches are made when place nodes are ‘label’ members in the boundary relation, have the same wikidata tag or, in restricted cases, have the same name. If that does not work, check if the boundary has a place tag that defines what kind of place it is.

  3. If the matched place type does not fit the address function start shifting the address rank of the boundary. The important rule here is that the admin level hierarchy is kept as is. The rank can only be decreased when there is no other boundary in the way. When the rank increases, then all boundaries inside it with a higher admin_level automatically increase their rank as well. This latter rule ensures that places like Warsaw get the right address and all containing boundaries remain part of the city.

  4. Take all the place nodes that are not linked and assign them an address rank, thus putting them into the hierarchy. Again this assignment can be defined on a per-country basis, which is useful especially for less well defined place types like ‘municipality’.

  5. If a place node now finds itself in an administrative boundary with exactly the same address rank, then this place node’s rank is increased. This solves the problem of the ‘suburb villages’. An independent village usually finds itself in a county boundary and therefore can keep its default rank as city in the address sense. If the place=village is inside a city boundary (which already has the address rank of a city), it gets degraded to the address level of a suburb.

Once every boundary and place node have an assigned address rank, creating an address for a place boils down to finding the relevant once close by and sorting them by their assigned address rank.

What it means for mapping in OSM

Nominatim tries its best to take into account the mapping habits and make the best of local particularities. Still you can help to make life easier for geocoders like Nominatim. Here are a couple of hints:

  • When you map an administrative boundary and a place node, make sure to link them. Either add them with role ‘label’[Do not use ‘admin_centre’. This designates the seat of the administration which may or may not be the same entity as the boundary.] or make sure they have the same wikidata tag.

  • Add place nodes or place tags for administrative boundaries where the administrative level is not a clear indicator what the place type might be.

  • Review the free place nodes in your area and check that they are used consistently. Within a city, don’t mix place=suburb, place=village, etc. if they should refer to the same level of hierarchy. Conversely, if there are different levels like suburb and neighbourhood, make sure to use different place types for them. The same is true for rural areas. The distinction whether hamlets are just suburbs of a village or independent is very difficult to make with today’s OSM data.

  • Try to complete administrative boundaries for your area. If there are no formal boundaries, you can also map place=* items as areas.

These changes are already live on nominatim.openstreetmap.org and openstreetmap.org. However, they only affect newly changed data, while we are still busy ironing out the last kinks in the implementation. Once this is done, the database will be re-imported so that all data follows this new scheme.

  1. Well, mostly. In some countries like the US, administrative areas are not the same as the area the post office or, in fact, any sane person would define for that place. But that is again something for another post.