any help with geocoding and reverse geocoding without api or from open source

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Deepak Sharda

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Apr 18, 2020, 1:00:38 PM4/18/20
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i googled and get this site address which is open source of geocoding and reverse geocoding but i am not expert in node.js  could you help . 


is it helpful for data relating to india. 


there was a file aattached as sample data for india 

https://github.com/pelias/pelias
whosonfirst-data-postalcode-in-latest.spatial.db.bz2

Bhanu K

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Apr 18, 2020, 10:56:58 PM4/18/20
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Hi Deepak,

Few options depending on the tool:

- if Google Sheets is an option, Geocode by Awesome Table is a good add-on.
- if Microsoft Excel is an option, geocode-excel is an offline version.
- Nominatim API can be used in a language of your choice.

thanks,
Bhanu


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Nikhil VJ

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Apr 19, 2020, 1:36:25 AM4/19/20
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Hi Deepak,

I was digging up regarding this recently and tried one option that didn't work out; sharing my notes:

Starting rule : Cannot rely on 3rd party service; needs to be self-hosted; use OSM country extract from https://download.geofabrik.de/ as base data.

Starting point:

OSM wiki page listing several different software for searching places:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Search_engines


Osmnames + Sphinxsearch :

This seemed easier to start off so tried it. Once I got it depoyed, didn't get any proper results even for city names. I'm guessing the parameters may require fine-tuning. And I couldn't understand why they are involving wikipedia. It seemed like the search was relying more on data from wikipedia than from OSM.

Didn't explore on it further. (Spare time burned up!)


Nominatim related leads, where I want to dig into in next sprint:

https://www.cascadia-analytics.com/2017/10/01/nominatim-docker.html

https://github.com/mediagis/nominatim-docker


Pelias seems promising too, but we need a proper elasticsearch deployment to run it and that takes up quite some memory.


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My personal observations, may be inaccurate:

We should treat geocoding and reverse geocoding as two different applications.


Reverse geocoding would be much simpler to do, since you just need to put in the lat-longs and cough up the closest place names.


Geocoding involves complicated textual search, especially given the variations in ways place names are stored. There has to be high flexibility like making up for spelling differences. So elasticsearch seems like a good fit for it. Then, geo-constraining searches is very important here. We need ways to progressively narrow down the search areas and cut out false positives. Letting the user draw a box on the map to search in, for example, can greatly increase effectiveness of results rather than searching the whole country / planet data.


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Cheers,
Nikhil VJ
https://nikhilvj.co.in


Deepak Sharda

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Apr 26, 2020, 6:01:12 AM4/26/20
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i am trying to pelicia with qgis and try to dig data will update you once i get some results

Jobin Jose

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Apr 26, 2020, 6:35:31 AM4/26/20
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Sajjad Anwar

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Apr 27, 2020, 12:55:37 AM4/27/20
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Highly recommend https://opencagedata.com/. Based on OSM and several open datasets. Really good API and documentation. Also free for a pretty good number of requests.

Sajjad

Deepak Sharda

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May 5, 2020, 12:30:08 AM5/5/20
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thanks a lot.

i have so many data sets u can ask any time in shapefiles

Rajesvari Parasa

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Jun 23, 2020, 9:36:20 AM6/23/20
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Thank you, this thread was very helpful!
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Regards,
Rajesvari

Akshay S Dinesh

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Jun 23, 2020, 9:51:08 AM6/23/20
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Ah. I didn't notice this thread.

Pelias is completely free software and has importers for OSM data, geonames data and some other data sources. It allows import of a custom CSV with latitude and longitude also.

https://geocode.earth/ is a cloud instance run by the same people and can be used to preview how the results will be.

I've set it up once. I agree it takes some RAM to have elastic running fast.

As for India data, I think the alternate spellings aren't getting imported from OSM, geonames, etc. And therefore, the results are slightly less useful. Perhaps the importers can be patched to fix this.

But if you want to run a geocoding service on your own (or have loads of queries to make), it is a great starting point.

Akshay


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