Geo Coding using nominatim

General talk
1

Hi,

in my openlayers application I want to use nominatim for geo coding (I was told on the open layers forum to ask here, hope that is the right spot).

The location I want to search for is “Marienplatz Muenchen” (which is Munich, Germany), doing so on www.openstreetmap.org shows the correct results from nominatim.

If I call

http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?format=xml&polygon=0&addressdetails=0&q=Marienplatz+Muenchen

I do get other results which mainly do NOT belong to Munich, if do instead

http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?format=xml&polygon=0&addressdetails=0&q=Marienplatz+Munich

I get proper results. People in Germany would enter Muenchen and not Munich so why is this service behaving so strangely?

Second Question:
The next question is that Muenchen is in German München, a URL encodning, e.g. M%FCnchen does not work, how can I use German Umlaut (and potentially other non latin-1 characters) in the nominatim service?

Thanks,
K.

2

Search for “Marienplatz, Muenchen” and you will get proper results.
When using the nominatim Web-Interface it seems that a comma is url-encoded, but a ü is not.

3

Hi,

whatever I typ into http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ (or use the RESTful query)

I get the same wrong results. The first hit is always Marienplatz, Kloster Indersdorf, Markt Indersdorf, Dachau. Only if I use Munich instead of Muenchen or München regardless of " " or “,” I get proper results. Did you the result you expected when using Muenchen?

Thanks, K.