Hey everyone!
I’m Rupam Golui - you can call me Agasta too, I prefer it :)
I’ve been selected for Google Summer of Code 2026 with OpenStreetMap and I’ll be working on adding proper native category support to OSM’s search engine Nominatim under the mentorship of @lonvia and @mtmail
Right now Nominatim relies on a single class/type pair per place which causes duplicate entries, makes admin boundaries annoying to handle, and limits advanced search (like “vegan restaurants” or “wheelchair accessible places”). The goal is to introduce a clean category system (starting with osm.amenity.restaurant, cuisine.italian, etc.) so search becomes much more powerful while cleaning up the database at the same time. So instead of just searching “restaurant near me” you could do something like:
/search?q=restaurant+berlin&include=cuisine.italian&exclude=food.fast_food
- Full diary posts + my background: → My OSM Diary
- Full proposal: → proposal
- Find me on X: @idkAgasta
Super excited for this! If you use Nominatim and have thoughts on what category filtering would be useful for your workflows… drop them here, it’ll genuinely be helpful.
I’ll keep posting updates and progress throughout the summer in this thread.
Cheers,
Agasta