Gregory's Server3/ Meanwhile the global OpenStreetMap community is continually collecting all kinds of data about the world, which is great. πͺπΊοΈ
This can go to intense detail: every tree, park bench, foot path, etc. That's wonderful, but ...
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 5/ Many services get it wrong. We call this the "Berlin, Berlin" bug. In the United States πΊπΈ it is normal to show <city>, <state> in the address. In Germany π©πͺ , Berlin is both a city and a state, but no one ever refers to "Berlin, Berlin". Only American services do that. 6/ Subtle i18n details like this add up to make a service feel natural and easy to use (or not). When it's not right it's like the pebble in your shoe πͺ¨π that keeps annoying you. address-formatting is our open source project to know how to make addresses look right 7/ the address-formatting project is a collection of templates that let us know how to display an address for each country/territory (251 in total) in the world πππ 8/ The address-formatting templates themselves can be used in any programming language, and there are now 11 different parsers. π₯³ Yeah, open source! 9/ Most importantly we have hundreds of tests. We're always adding more, and welcome your suggestions. There is no shortage of global addressing edge cases. You can see address-formatting in action in the "formatted" string in our geocoding API results. 10/ We hope you enjoyed this week's #geoeducation thread, a small peek behind the curtain πͺ at life at a geocoding service. We have links to many more geothreads about border disputes, exclaves, #geoweirdness of individual countries, reverse geocoding, etc listed on our blog: 11/ Bonus address formatting toot - there have been MANY different schemes to replace or supplement addresses using various codes or word combinations: What3Words, geohashes, H3 codes, MGRS codes, UN/LOCODES, etc. Each with pros and cons. We return many of these different codes as "annotations" to our geocoding results, see: https://opencagedata.com/api#annotations @opencage I tried resolving this in #OpenStreetMap, for my talk "Add Geocoordinates to your addresses in #PostgreSQL". The results are ... wild! |
4/ When someone sends our API a geocoding request, we look in the database and see all kinds of stuff.
We need to sift through it, and turn it into a well formatted address that matches the local way of presenting addresses that makes sense for that location.
It's not always simple.