The primary problem is that when I search for my postal address, the location is not found. When I leave out the city, the address is found under a different city. I edited the road city and zip, and that seems to help the search, but it still comes up Marblehill as the city.
I check many of the roads in the area, and they all have the same issue. I check my previous address, and I get the same errors there. I check another address from 15 years ago, same results. All three locations are in Georgia. And just about any road in those areas also has the same problem.
When a road is entered into OSM, how does the system assign a city to it for searching? How can we get the correct city to match with the roads?
Part of the problem was that the Pickens County ‘boundary’ and the Pickens ‘place node’ weren’t properly linked, so the system thought that Jasper and Marblehill were in different counties. I’ve fixed that part, at least, though the address is still wrong. At this point it should just be a matter of getting re-indexed, and the kicks I gave to the road weren’t violent enough. unfortunately.
Ok, there seems to be a systemic problem with the maps in Georgia. I just tested the streets around my last three addresses in Georgia. I can see the streets on the OSM map. But Nominatim cannot find the streets when I enter the address.
When I search for a street inside a city’s boundary, Nominatim finds it. The addresses I am searching for are outside the city limits, and Nominatim cannot find it. The majority of roads in Georgia are not inside city limits. I’m still confused at to how the system works. How does a road get assigned to a city? Does it choose the closest city? I’ll ask again: When a road is entered into OSM, how does the system assign a city to it for searching? How can we get the correct city to match with the roads?
I’m all new to this and want to help. But I don’t understand how the system work.
Example roads not found:
blackgum drive, jasper ga
cox mountain drive, jasper ga
ridgeview drive, jasper ga
post oak lane, jasper ga
willow drive, jasper ga
poplar circle, jasper ga
watford glen, lawrenceville ga
adger court, lawrenceville ga
foster trace drive, lawrenceville ga
spring rose glen, lawrenceville ga
camp perrin road, lawrenceville ga
bagley road, cumming ga
stonegate drive, cumming ga
oak leaf trail, cumming ga
caney road, cumming ga
brookwater drive, cumming ga
It’s not just Georgia, it’s an ongoing issue with many ‘place nodes’ not being linked properly to the ‘boundaries’ of the same place. This causes drama such as half of a county being a ‘child’ of the node, and the other half being a ‘child’ of the boundary.
Addresses are supposed to be able to be ‘forced’ an assignment to a particular city in the same county by setting the addr:city field on the road to the right one. This only works if Nominatim considers the city to be a ‘child’ of the next ‘upper-level division’, i.e. the county. If the county relation is broken, then often the road is not assigned to a ‘copy’ of the county that includes the city it is supposed to be attached to.
Similar issues can occur with things like postal codes, and also cause addressing problems. Figuring out exactly what is going on in a particular case involves looking the location up on nominatim.openstreetmap.org, finding where the places are ‘addressed to’, and fixing the broken relations so that Nominatim doesn’t have to make assumptions, because it often guesses wrong. The way that Nominatim actually guesses is not well documented (I don’t understand it, totally) but it involves distance to the place, and an ‘importance score’ that is figured from the number of incoming wikipedia links to the article about the place… basically, it’s an ‘educated guess’, and it’s frequently not right.
There are a couple of people (including me) that are currently making it a mission to fix this for all of the counties in the US, but it’s going to take a while. Trying to fix it for all the towns? Well, that’s a massive job.
Take a look at http://ksmapper.blogspot.com/ where ToeBee explains how to do this for counties…the process for cities is similar, but just getting the county fixed should resolve a lot of the problems. In some cases, though, the county will need to be manually ‘kicked’ for re-indexing by a Nominatim admin before it will be resolved.
