OpenStreetMap Nominatim schema inconsistencies

General talk
1

I am trying out the OpenStreetMap Nominatim reverse-geocoder RESTFul API.

Is there a definitive explanation of the address schema returned from the API? Some locations have different attributes in the ‘addressparts’ block.

For example, for Seattle, Nominatim includes “suburb” and “city” attributes.

http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/reverse?format=xml&lat=47.60647&lon=-122.32644&zoom=18&addressdetails=1


<addressparts>
    <house_number>725</house_number>
    <road>9th Avenue</road>
    <suburb>First Hill</suburb>
    <city>Seattle</city>
    <county>King</county>
    <state>Washington</state>
    <postcode>98104</postcode>
    <country>United States of America</country>
    <country_code>us</country_code>
</addressparts>

However, for New York City, it returns “neighborhood” and “state_district” attributes.

http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/reverse?format=xml&lat=40.71812&lon=-73.98298&zoom=18&addressdetails=1


<addressparts>
    <address29>N.Y. Grill & Deli</address29>
    <house_number>208</house_number>
    <road>Rivington Street</road>
    <neighbourhood>Lower East Side</neighbourhood>
    <state_district>New York City</state_district>
    <county>New York</county>
    <state>New York</state>
    <postcode>10002</postcode>
    <country>United States of America</country>
    <country_code>us</country_code>
</addressparts>
2

About this special topic you can try to ask OSM user lonvia … she is quite active at help.osm.org, see https://help.openstreetmap.org/users/2921/lonvia

or at the OSM wiki: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Lonvia

3

Thank you for the pointer; I’ll contact her. However, I don’t understand why this is a special topic. Surely the address schema inconsistency must be a very general problem, no?

4

OSM doesn’t really do consistency.

5

Looks like it depends on how the object is tagged in OSM.