Search result for borough shows node. Would boundary be more appropriate?

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Hi folks,

I’m new here. Forgive me if this is a silly suggestion.

I just searched for “Islington” on openstreetmap.org, and this was the result: Node: ‪Islington‬ (‪27365020‬) | OpenStreetMap

However, I feel like this is what I was looking for: Relation: ‪London Borough of Islington‬ (‪51821‬) | OpenStreetMap

and I wonder whether it might be sensible to change the default behavior such that boundaries are shown rather than just nodes in circumstances like this?

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It’s absolutely not silly. There was an entire session at the just-finished SOTM-EU conference “It’s traditional - Boundaries and Places in the UK” (search for that here) to try and pick a way forward for this.

Quite a lot of people disagreed about things and reminded each other than (e.g.) Greater London and Greater Manchester actually both exist. The challenge is that the place hierarchy (where people think they live) and the admin hierarchy (who empties the bins etc.) don’t often match in the UK, and don’t match in slightly different ways in each of Wales, England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Your node is a place=suburb called “Islington” and your relation is a boundary=administrative; admin_level=8 called “London Borough of Islington”.

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I think I’m realising a slight misunderstanding on my part. I thought that the only search result was for the node, whereas there were others, just hidden behind the “more results” button. There it gives me a result for the boundary, which is what I was looking for.

So I guess my thought changes to: what determines the relative weighting of search results in this situation, and where there exists a node and boundary in search results, does it make sense to weight the boundary higher than the node?

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I think a complication here is that the name in OSM data is literally “London Borough of Islington”, as mentioned above. If you search for those exact words, that is the first result. For Nominatim to prioritise that in a search for Islington it would have to work out that part of the string “London Borough of Islington” is somehow more “placename like” than the other part - and apply that to “Islington” but not “London”!

For some structures in the underlying data, the search engine does in fact take you directly to an admin boundary - try Oxford for example.

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In general, label would be used for the corresponding or associated place= (Nominatim “Linked Places” in debug view)
However, there’s no place= corresponding to the Borough. This can be seen from another =suburb (Highbury) being the admin_centre of the Borough. So this is at least distinguishing the Islington community, and the Islington Borough. The next question could be how OSM Nominatim decided to return the =suburb higher than the admin_level=8 , which is answered above. To possibly improve this, it might depend on whether eg short_name=Islington is correct for the Borough. Internationally and fundamentally, you can ask how the name= is decided vs official_name= in other cases.