OSM gives wrong address for my coordinates to 3rd Party App

General talk
1

Hello, I am new to OSM. The reason I registered is to try to correct the OSM address data for my location coordinates that is accessed by the Followmee App when I use its function to download my tracks for the past x hours or days. The Followmee Dev Team state that the wrong address conversion from the coordinates is not a problem with their app, because “We use OpenStreetMap as the geocoding provider and that is what they provide.”

One location in particular is way out. That location is -33.82349, 151.2462 which is in Stanley Avenue, Mosman, New South Wales, 2088, Australia. However, the address shown by Followmee, provided by OSM, is “Sydney Harbour, Coolong Road, Vaucluse, Sydney, New South Wales, 2029, Australia”. Firstly “Sydney Harbour” is not an address or suburb, but is a very large waterway covering a very large area. Furthermore, Vaucluse is a suburb on the southern side of Sydney Harbour, whereas Mosman is on the Northern side of Sydney Harbour. The coordinates of Coolong Road Vaucluse are approx -33.8513, 151.27009.

This inaccuracy is frustrating the utility of the Followmee App for me, which is the main reason I subscribed to it.

I would greatly appreciate any assistance on how to fix this issue.

Best regards,

Don

2

So when entering your first coordinate pair into the search box of http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/

I can get a result with the same result like your mentioned address.

You can click on “details” there to see all the elements that Nominatim uses for its result … but does this help you?

Maybe you can browse the OSM wiki about http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim to see how you can track down such “errors” in reverse geocoding.

Or if you want, see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Search_engines … there are one or two other OSM based search engines which can do reverse geocoding … maybe you get other results?

3

Nominatim returns the address almost like you wrote it: 5, Stanley Avenue, Balmoral, Mosman, Sydney, New South Wales, 2088, Australia
http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/details.php?place_id=2612665440
It seems that the application is not using Nominatim, but another reverse geocoding provider.

4

I can’t reproduce the OP’s results at any zoom level, so I can only assume either Nominatim wasn’t used, or there was a local mis-mapping that has since been fixed.

However, one should note that the results of a nominatim search vary with the specified zoom level so it is necessary to specify that when saying the result is wrong.

Also nominatim is not trying to return a postal address. It is trying to match a feature, consistent with the zoom level, then give the hierarchy of containing regions, or nearest closest matching point at hierarchy levels that are not mapped as regions.

I assume we are talking about FollowMee (with two e’s) on Android. An app like that should not be ujsing the main database or the nominatim api directly; it should be working with local copies, which may not be completely up to date.