Trouble finding destinations when creating a route

opengeocoder
1

Sometimes openrouteservice I have trouble finding destinations with openrouteservice.

Working example: Blockstensvägen 48, Karlskoga

If I type just “Blockstensvägen” it gives 5 choices. Fair enough!

If I then add “48”, the 5 choises are reduced to 2. Fair enough!

If i then add “karlskoga”, the 2 choices are reduced to 1, and I have my desired result! Fair enough!

Exactly as it should be working.

Non working example: Bladvägen 24, Karlskoga

If i type just “Bladvägen” it gives 5 choices. Fair enough!

If I then add “24”, the 5 are reduced to 4, but these 4 are not the same as the one present in the earlier search. Hmm… but still fair enough. The top one is the one I am looking for, but it doesn’t say “karlskoga”, instead it shows the post code?

So when I finally add “Karlskoga” to the search, it can not find the specific adress, it only finds the street :confused:

I realise that when I only give a street name it (probably) searches for streets only, and when I give a specific adress, it swithces to searching for adresses on specific buildings (or nodes).

As to the OSM data in these two cases, I find no other difference than that the post codes are written with or without a space.

Blockstensvägen, the street: way id=249837476
Blockstensvägen 48, the building: way id=250244400

Bladvägen, the street: way id=80262359
Bladvägen 24, the building: way id=293320879

I can see no significant difference between the data, so why do they give so different result when searching?

(I should have added screenshots and links to clearify the problem but “new users can only add one image…” so you will have to use your imagination, or repeat my searches… :face_with_raised_eyebrow: )

2

Hi,

it uses Pelias geocoder behind the scenes and we didn’t update the DB in a while. In fact, I’m finally doing it again, as there’s been a lot of improvements to the project lately, which will ensure, that we can regularly run new imports.

As for the frontend implementation: it’s hard to debug for us. We have to rely on Pelias doing its thing correctly and can’t respond to single problems. However, please check back next week, when a new build is implemented.

3

Ahh, I see. The specific adress mentioned above was added to OSM almost 2 years ago. Has the DB not been updated for 2 years? I would have assumed things like this would be updated fairly regularly…

An updated DB would of course be useful :slight_smile:
I’ll check again in a week.

4

No, of course not that long. And in the end it’s hard to debug why single addresses are not found as you’d expect them. There are a few language processors at work and none of them is perfect… libpostal is the main one and it often has trouble.

Geocoding might seem trivial, but believe me, it’s not. In a way, it’s actually harder than finding a route, at least that’s fairly deterministic. The main challenge is parsing the free unstructured text you type in into meaningful/structured components which can be understood by a search engine.