Reverse geocoding gives city of nearest object, not city of current position

[openstreetmap-trac]

Reporter: AlphaTiger [Submitted to the original trac issue database at 7.49pm, Monday, 13th August 2012]

Hi,

With some ways which go through multiple cities, reverse geocoding answers the wrong city, as the address given contains the city at the nearest object's centroid, and not the city of the position asked.

For instance, for this point : http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=48.503321&mlon=1.702448&zoom=14&layers=M reverse nominatim answers : http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/reverse?lat=48.503321&lon=1.702448

The city of the point is not Bleury-Saint-Symphorien, it is clearly Ymeray; we get this city as answer as the nearest object is "L'Ocane" (http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/128525165) and its centroid is in Bleury-Saint-Symphorien.

Reverse geocoding should not "blindly" use the computed address of the nearest object, but should instead (try to) search for the point's current city, region, etc. to give a correct address.

I don't know enough how nominatim works, but wouldn't the SQL query in [https://trac.openstreetmap.org/browser/applications/utils/nominatim/website/reverse.php reverse.php] lines 95-102 return the current city in the objects (maybe by removing rank considerations) ?

Thanks !

[openstreetmap-trac]

Author: Vincent de Phily [Added to the original trac issue at 9.36am, Tuesday, 14th August 2012]

FYI, the original report came from [http://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/15033/pb-ville-lorsquune-route-en-traverse-plusieurs-pb-city-where-road-crosses-several a question on help.osm.org]. It might make the problem clearer.

[openstreetmap-trac]

Author: cquest [Added to the original trac issue at 9.39am, Tuesday, 14th August 2012]

The problem lies in using only ST_Distance to order the result.

A better result could be obtained by mixing the selected objets based on 2 different criterias: ST_Distance to name the nearest object (the name of the road/street) and ST_Distance(ST_Centroid()) to get the details about the city/town of the given location and not using the one of the centroid of the nearest objet which can actually be quite far away.

In order to do this, the SQL query needs to provide both ST_Distance and ST_Distance(ST_Centroid()) in its results (which should be minimal additionnal cost in the query) and have some additionnal post-processing in the php code only when the difference between both distances is significant.

[openstreetmap-trac]

Author: lonvia [Added to the original trac issue at 11.46am, Tuesday, 14th August 2012]

Replying to [comment:2 cquest]:

The problem lies in using only ST_Distance to order the result.

Sorry but it is not as simple as that because currently there are no distances to any address objects calculated. Doing so would add a pretty heavy performance penalty and is simply not worth the trouble.

[openstreetmap-trac]

Author: cquest [Added to the original trac issue at 9.49pm, Tuesday, 14th August 2012]

Replying to [comment:3 lonvia]:

Replying to [comment:2 cquest]:

The problem lies in using only ST_Distance to order the result.

Sorry but it is not as simple as that because currently there are no distances to any address objects calculated. Doing so would add a pretty heavy performance penalty and is simply not worth the trouble.

Well, the code at https://trac.openstreetmap.org/browser/applications/utils/nominatim/website/reverse.php shows an "ORDER BY ST_Distance" at line 102... so distance is already calculated or I'm not looking at the right code.

[openstreetmap-trac]

Author: lonvia [Added to the original trac issue at 6.34am, Wednesday, 15th August 2012]

Replying to [comment:4 cquest]:

Replying to [comment:3 lonvia]:

Sorry but it is not as simple as that because currently there are no distances to any address objects calculated. Doing so would add a pretty heavy performance penalty and is simply not worth the trouble.

Well, the code at https://trac.openstreetmap.org/browser/applications/utils/nominatim/website/reverse.php shows an "ORDER BY ST_Distance" at line 102... so distance is already calculated or I'm not looking at the right code.

You are not looking at the right code. This is the part where it finds the nearest object. The address parts are requested at line 133ff.

[openstreetmap-trac]

Author: lonvia [Added to the original trac issue at 6.48am, Wednesday, 15th August 2012]

Using the address of the nearest object for the reverse query was a deliberate design decision. Calculating the address involves a lot of voodoo because it has to work world-wide and with different tagging schemas. It would be too expensive to do at each reverse request.

The other thing is that long ways become less and less frequent, the better a region gets mapped. Ways are split for taggings like maxspeed and for route relations and turn restrictions. The moment the way is split, the issue goes away by itself because each part can have a different address. So I wouldn't call it a major issue.