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Ilya Zverev

People usually need three things from maps: tiles, geocoding, and routing. Three things too mundane to work on.

For Maps.Me Changes Monitoring, I filtered edits by countries. For that I wrote a simple reverse geocoder: QueryAt.

It returns a country, a region, and a populated place for a given location. 3 GB database for the entire world, no configuration or query parameters.

Won't recommend using it now though: 8 years later, you could do better.

github.com/zverik/queryat

23 May at 16:46 | Open on en.osm.town
3 comments
Ilya Zverev replied to Ilya

The recent discussion around "class:bicycle" tag reminded me of my "surface:grade" proposal — basically the same thing, but done 13 years earlier, with 25k usages as of now and no clear documentation.

wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Pr

Basically it's a measure of surface quality relative to roads with that surface quality. Not all roads ever, like smoothness=*.

You see a perfect gravel road? surface:quality=3. You're on a technically asphalt road and moving 1 km/h wishing they left it unpaved? Zero.

The recent discussion around "class:bicycle" tag reminded me of my "surface:grade" proposal — basically the same thing, but done 13 years earlier, with 25k usages as of now and no clear documentation.

wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Pr

Basically it's a measure of surface quality relative to roads with that surface quality. Not all roads ever, like smoothness=*.

26 May at 17:16 | Open on en.osm.town
Ilya Zverev replied to Ilya

Having tag proposals on this list feels like cheating — despite those take weeks to materialize, mostly because of research and writing and discussing in our Russian-speaking community.

For example, my turns lanes proposal took two weeks researching eight other proposals, charting examples, writing the proposal and FAQ.

wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Pr

It failed because it was hard to understand, unlike the semantically weird but simple turn:lanes schema.

Mappers need simple, not consistent.

Having tag proposals on this list feels like cheating — despite those take weeks to materialize, mostly because of research and writing and discussing in our Russian-speaking community.

For example, my turns lanes proposal took two weeks researching eight other proposals, charting examples, writing the proposal and FAQ.

26 May at 18:06 | Open on en.osm.town
Ilya Zverev replied to Ilya

When I set out to write a reverse geocoder, I had a very narrow scope in mind: basically the east coast of the US. But the longer you study something, the more edge cases you find. Got a few talks out of it:

youtube.com/watch?v=sjE6xy0BBg

Juno Reverse Geocoder is covered in tests no other geocoder would pass, and is built on SQL. I bragged that it was faster than Nominatim, but recently I've tested it and it's like 8 times slower. Still, worked fine for our company.

github.com/gojuno/jrg

When I set out to write a reverse geocoder, I had a very narrow scope in mind: basically the east coast of the US. But the longer you study something, the more edge cases you find. Got a few talks out of it:

youtube.com/watch?v=sjE6xy0BBg

Juno Reverse Geocoder is covered in tests no other geocoder would pass, and is built on SQL. I bragged that it was faster than Nominatim, but recently I've tested it and it's like 8 times slower. Still, worked fine for our company.

28 May at 12:53 | Open on en.osm.town
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