Option to search for "city" in addr:city and addr:district at once

[bogatkaj]

Hey, I have the following problem:

I'm programming on a tool for disaster relief management at scene for the german speaking countries.
For Germany I'm having issues with an address in a smaller town.

The name of the town is "Nordkampen", which belongs to the city of Walsrode (and therefore the correct addr is Nordkampen 10, 29664 Walsrode), but is a so called "Ortschaft".

So in Germany you would rather say someone is from Nordkampen instead of from the district of Nordkampen in Walsrode.
So if someone searches for the address and types in Nordkampen as city, Nominatim doesn't returns a result.

Is there any option to set, to also search for the district?

Example urls:

City = Nordkampen:
http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?street=Nordkampen%2011&city=Nordkampen&country=Deutschland&addressdetails=1&accept-language=de-DE&countrycodes=de&format=geocodejson&limit=1&layer=address&dedup=1

City = Walsrode:
http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?street=Nordkampen%2011&city=Walsrode&country=Deutschland&addressdetails=1&accept-language=de-DE&countrycodes=de&format=geocodejson&limit=1&layer=address&dedup=1

[lonvia]

If you have user-supplied input that is not supposed to be a strict address, I would advise against using form input and structured search. Just use a free-form field and people will likely just type 'nordkampen 11' in this case, which will work.

That said, 'nordkampen 11, nordkampen' really should get results as well. And if that works, the structured search would work as well. We already had the discussion in #2496, which I've now reopened.

[bogatkaj]

Hey thanks for the response.
We have in fact a software form where the user enters the address in separate fields (street, number, ZIP, city), but as these info is often entered from verbally communicated info and / or under pressure, we can't assure complete correctness.
So the main reason for using nominatim is to get the coordinate of the entered address but also correcting the address if possible.

In personally would like to have some more optional parameters to define which fields are searched in which way (like a bool parameter to do two queries w. & w.o. the zip-code at once, as the zip sometimes leads to no or wrong results)

P.S.
The topic in 2496 is a bit different i guess, since, in this particular case, Nordkampen is in fact the street (and town) in the official address, so addr:place tag doesn't applies here according to the OSM wiki.

(For clarification on German: Das Ortsschild latutet "Nordkampen - Stadt Walsrode", die postalische Adresse in Nordkmapnen lautet durchgängig "Nordkampen X, 29664 Walsrode", sprich hier ist der Straßenname offiziell gegeben und somit die Nutzung von addr:place lt. OSM wiki nicht vorgesehen)

[lonvia]

Even if you have separate fields in your form, you can still use the free-text query mode for Nominatim to get a bit more flexibility. Simply concatenate the fields using a comma. Make sure to keep proper "address order".

Postcodes and housenumbers are already optional to a certain degree. The behaviour here is hard-coded and cannot be configured.

If you want to try different version of converting your input in a query then you need to do this on the client side and simply send two queries.

(For clarification on German: Das Ortsschild latutet "Nordkampen - Stadt Walsrode", die postalische Adresse in Nordkmapnen lautet durchgängig "Nordkampen X, 29664 Walsrode", sprich hier ist der Straßenname offiziell gegeben und somit die Nutzung von addr:place lt. OSM wiki nicht vorgesehen)

I don't understand this statement. This is exactly the use-case for addr:place and also mapped that way. Addresses in the hamlet come out exactly right.

[bogatkaj]

Sorry for the late reply...

I found a way to may make my problem with this topic more clear:

If I search for Nordkampen 10, 29664 Walsrode or Zollstraße 10, Hordorf ( the one in Cremlingen) I get the right coordinates, but if I turn on addressdetails in the query, I don't get a valid address to use, since these hamlets don't give back a valid city or town and I can't clearly determine when to use the district based on the return values or the address the user entered (needed in our case for address correction)

Maybe I'm missing something here, but some help would be welcome.

Have a nice weekend!

[mtmail]

The format=geocodejson returns Cremlingen as city while the default format doesn't. Can you test if that'd work for your use case?

Nominatim version 5.1.0-0

nominatim search --query 'Nordkampen 10, 29664 Walsrode' --addressdetails
        "display_name": "10, Nordkampen, Walsrode, Heidekreis, Niedersachsen, 29664, Deutschland",
        "address": {
            "house_number": "10",
            "village": "Nordkampen",
            "town": "Walsrode",
            "county": "Heidekreis",
            "state": "Niedersachsen",
            "ISO3166-2-lvl4": "DE-NI",
            "postcode": "29664",
            "country": "Deutschland",
            "country_code": "de"

nominatim search --query 'Zollstraße 10, Hordorf' --addressdetails
       "display_name": "10, Zollstraße, Hordorf, Cremlingen, Landkreis Wolfenbüttel, Niedersachsen, 38162, Deutschland",
        "address": {
            "house_number": "10",
            "road": "Zollstraße",
            "village": "Hordorf",
            "county": "Landkreis Wolfenbüttel",
            "state": "Niedersachsen",
            "ISO3166-2-lvl4": "DE-NI",
            "postcode": "38162",
            "country": "Deutschland",
            "country_code": "de"
        },

nominatim search --query 'Zollstraße 10, Hordorf' --addressdetails --format geocodejson
                    "housenumber": "10",
                    "postcode": "38162",
                    "street": "Zollstraße",
                    "district": "Hordorf",
                    "city": "Cremlingen",
                    "county": "Landkreis Wolfenbüttel",
                    "state": "Niedersachsen",
                    "country": "Deutschland",
                    "country_code": "de",
                    "admin": {
                        "level8": "Cremlingen",
                        "level6": "Landkreis Wolfenbüttel",
                        "level4": "Niedersachsen"
                    }

[bogatkaj]

Hey, thanks for the reply

That's in fact our problem:

We currently use the following scheme for disambiguation when a town is entered without a zip code (what must be possible in our software):

if (postcode != undefined) {
  var result = API.result(QueryWithZIP)
  if (result.postcode == postcode AND city in result.city ) {
    return result
  }
}
else {
  var result = API.result(QueryWithoutZIP)
  if (city in result.city) {
    return result
  }
}

At the moment we use a workaround where city is also checkt against district, but I don't know if this will work for all countries.

(It's also planned to give the user a list to choose from, but this can also lead to wrong choices in usage cases where the user doesn't knows the locality)

[lonvia]

Check your city against label. It will still be brittle because there is no guarantee that your user input uses the canonical name of the town/city which nominatim returns. We might give you a better answer, if you tell us why you recheck the city name.