Hello everyone,
I am trying to create maps regarding deportations in France by pinpointing the locations of families based on their addresses. For some of them, I have the addresses but lack the coordinates.
I planned to use Nominatim by writing a small PC program that sends a request whenever the coordinate data is missing. I included a two-second delay after receiving the server’s response to each call. The process runs as a batch job covering about 20,000 lines in total, with nearly 2,000 sets of coordinates still to be found.
Despite this delay, the server denies me access after just ten or so requests.
I have read that it is possible to install the entire database locally, but I lack the necessary storage capacity and the technical skills for such an installation.
I am therefore seeking advice from anyone who has used—or currently uses—Nominatim.
Thank you for your valuable advice.
Jean-Michel
Retired school principal
For block itself, have you seen Nominatim Usage Policy (aka Geocoding Policy) ?
Setting up a local Nominatim server is fairly straightforward. When I wrote this diary entry I followed these instructions and it “just worked”, even though I hadn’t installed Nominatim anywhere before. I used a cloud server (at current prices a suitable one would be around €12 per month if it was allocated all the time, less if not), but a virtual machine on a local PC may also be an option.
I was using a “Britain and Ireland” data extract; I suspect that the data size resulting in a “France” one would not be vastly different.
Thank you for your messages.
I am the only one using my small application to try and find the coordinates for addresses that haven’t been filled in yet. I’m also going to look into setting up a small local server after extracting the data for France..
Jean Michel.
Hello Nandjm
When you’re pinpointing addresses from where families were deported, is this “recently”, or historically?
A one-time job of geocoding 2000 addresses at one request every two seconds should be very much within the usage policy and not get you blocked. Recheck that the delay is really applied and make sure that you set a custom user agent with your requests.
If you want to set up your own geocoder, have a look into Photon. It’s easy to set up and you can run France simply on your laptop, if you have about 15GB disk to spare.
Hello,
Historically
Hello,
Thanks for your message.
I did include a 2-second delay in the procedure I wrote in my program. I’ll double-check, though. I also correctly specified the “User Agent” with an email address in the request..
Jean Michel
I already have all the procedures for encoding my maps, which I developed for a previous project. I write my own software for this. See “FrenchHelpers.fr”
Pourquoi ne pas utiliser les API françaises, utilisables par lot ?
Quant aux spécificités des adresses en France, elle sont mieux connues du forum francophone https://forum.openstreetmap.fr.