Mapnik and Nominatim don't parse relations

General talk
1

I’ve been working to join 8 ways as one street using relation ‘street’ or ‘associatedStreet’.
I obviously named the relation with the street name.
When I search for that street, as a result I still get 8 ways, with the same name, to choose from.
If I remove the name from each way and keep it only as relation name:

  • Nominatim gives no results at all
  • Mapnik makes the whole street unnamed
    Someone said to wait for an update of Nominatim.
    I used ‘OSM Relation Analyzer’ to look for random old "associatedStreet"s, "street"s and "route"s.
    I’ve tested them in Nominatim and I never get the relation, I always get a list of its members.
    I find this to be very bad for an end user.
    When you look for a street you should be given with the whole street, not a list of its members.
    Am I missing something?
2

You should not remove the name from the ways and hope that associatedStreet will solve the problem. Not a lot of data consumers support this relation. More over, there has been a really heated discussion on this relation in the past, were many people wanted to get rid of this relation.And even the proponents of the relation do not really know what should be mapped on the relation and what not.

As I see the current situation:

  • keep name on all ways
  • optionally add an associatedStreet.
  • live with the fact that nominatim returns multiple results.

By removing the name from the ways you break too many data-consumers.

3

Thank you @escada.
How about routes?
Relation type=route is marked with approved status, yet it is not parsed by Mapnik and Nominatim.
I like hiking and I see a lot of people making the effort of joining paths as route relations, yet only advanced users can benefit from it.
I wonder, what’s the use of these types of relation?

4

There is current post on the osm help site regarding downloading gpx of route relations
https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/23679/how-to-export-a-route-relation-as-gpx-or-kml

5

With regard to routes, the OSM “standard” style on osm.org doesn’t display them but there are many other map styles (e.g. http://hiking.waymarkedtrails.org/#?map=11!54.1931!-2.2859 , http://cycle.travel/map?lat=54.206&lon=-2.3895&zoom=11 and what I see on a Garmin handheld) that do. Most people don’t interact with OSM data via the OSM “standard” style. The chances are that they’ll see the data on some other website, and that if website’s targeted towards hikers it would make sense to show hiking route relations.

Nominatim is really about finding places, so it doesn’t find route relations either (though taginfo / overpass of course can): http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/name=Pennine%20Way , http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/gMo .

6

Thank you guys for the accurate explanations!