I can't understand how partial matches work in Nominatim. For example, let's take a look at Sesame Lane Childcare Centre in North Lakes, Australia. The following queries contain a partial name of this amenity and find it:
Sesame Lane Childcare Centre
Sesame Lane Childcare Centre north lakes
Sesame north lakes
But the following do not:
Sesame lane north lakes
Sesame lane childcare north lakes
Sesame lane centre north lakes
In contrary, let's consider Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, Poland. Every query containing a partial name of this building I tried finds this building:
palace culture warsaw
science culture warsaw
and culture warsaw
palace of science warsaw
I know that
> Nominatim reads queries from left to right
and that full matches are listed before partial matches, and that some keywords such as pub
are automatically converted to amenity=pub
. Here, only childcare
is a keyword but it doesn't explain why even Sesame lane north lakes
is not found unless lane
itself is also considered special but I am not sure whether it explains a difference between Sesame Lane Childcare Centre and Palace of Culture and Science. Can anybody explain what's the difference between them?
asked
01 May '15, 17:33
Arkadiusz Dr...
101●1●2●4
accept rate:
0%
Can anyone also explain why query such as 'palace culture wars' does not work?
Is there any way to fix this?
I don't know the answer, but might be able to suggest further places to read and places to ask.
I'd start with the wiki page. That's not guaranteed to be 100% up to date, but it might be helpful. You may be already be aware of the direct front-end for Nominatim - you can look at "details" of places that it can find which may help. Issues raised on github such as this one may also explain some of the inner workings.
With regard to the second part of the question (incomplete word matching) I don't believe that Nominatim does partial word (or misspelling) matching. One that does is Pelias by Mapzen - and there may be others.
You could also try asking in #osm or #osm-dev on IRC - people there may know more.