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Hi, I've found something odd with Nominatim search in Queensland Australia. If you search for "Brighton, Queensland" on osm.org , open.mapquest.com.au or by using this link:

http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?q=brighton+queensland&format=xml

the display result is: "Brighton, 4017, Cape Moreton, Queensland, Australia"

Why does it have Cape Moreton in the result?

Brighton is part of Brisbane City Council, (the admin boundary with Moreton Bay Council is out in the Bramble Bay channel I think.)

Cape Moreton as a place is out on Moreton Island, so not an Admin area?

Geoscience Australia Gazetteer entries for Cape Moreton: http://www.ga.gov.au/bin/gazm01?placename=cape+moreton&placetype=0&state=QLD

Wikipedia Cape Moreton entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Moreton

Can anyone help?

asked 06 May '11, 03:29

chas66's gravatar image

chas66
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accept rate: 0%


This type of issue has been answered before here. Usually this is due to one of the boundaries of this administrative entities either does not exist (e.g., the place is defined by a node) or it is no longer a complete polygon. Accidental (or deliberate) deletion of this information will cause a boundary to 'spill over' into adjacent areas. Additionally some surprisingly significant areas sometimes prove never to have been added to the database.

Take a look at answers to the following questions: nomination-reports-a-road-as-being-in-the-wrong-country where-can-i-learn-about-how-nominatim-works. And this forum post which was actually about the same underlying problem: http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=11687

Basically you need to check that the data for these areas is accurate and complete. There are various tools to do this. You can check the status of multipolygons using the MapQuest tool or OSM Inspector from Geofabrik. Nominatim also provides a detail browse view which will draw the polygons which it is using for a given place (e.g, Brighton).

Using the latter I see that Cape Moreton is tagged as place=region which Nominatim interprets as being a significant area and therefore likely to encompass a suburb. In general the place=region combination is used with too many different meanings for data consumers like Nominatim to be able to treat it consistently.

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answered 06 May '11, 11:12

SK53's gravatar image

SK53 ♦
28.1k48268433
accept rate: 22%

edited 11 Jun '11, 14:08

As SK53 says it's been asked before. here are my two related questions http://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/5198/suburbs-in-nominatim http://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/3919/how-can-i-find-and-modify-a-boundary basically you need to draw a polygon to restrict the name to it's area, but, it can take a while for the polygon to take effect on/in the nominatim

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answered 11 Jun '11, 21:37

andy%20mackey's gravatar image

andy mackey
13.2k87143285
accept rate: 4%

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question asked: 06 May '11, 03:29

question was seen: 4,259 times

last updated: 11 Jun '11, 21:37

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