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Since a month or so all the address gathered from OSM data in my city (Asti, Italy) shows the name of a nearby place as the city name, even it's just a small village included within the city area.

For example searching for "Piazza Alfieri Asti" on Nominatim it shows it belongs to Cascina Gioia, which is a small village of 4 houses.

I'm a n00b in OSM, so I don't know how to fix it, any help?

asked 17 Feb '20, 14:32

DaRk_ViVi's gravatar image

DaRk_ViVi
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accept rate: 0%


Don't worry too much about it. What you see there is the response from the search engine that is used on openstreetmap.org called Nominatim. Nominatim takes some guesses on where a certain location is located in regards to region, city, suburb etc. If all administrative entities would be mapped as boarders Nominatim could be doing that quite accurately. But since Cascina Gioia is only mapped as a node Nominatim does not know its extent. Probably Cascina Gioiais the closest hamlet to the location you were searching and that's why Nominatim thought your location could possibly belong to Cascina Gioia.

You get these strange looking results all the time but except for mapping all administrative entities as areas there is not much you can do about it. But there is nothing wrong in the map data.

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answered 18 Feb '20, 10:34

TZorn's gravatar image

TZorn
12.3k764225
accept rate: 15%

Well, Asti and its neighborhoods are mapped as areas, and Cascina Gioia is just a random hamlet on the other side of the city...

It's probably a bug of the current version of Nominatim. On nominatim.openstreetmap.org (development version?), you will see that Cascina Gioia does not appear in the detailed results.

(18 Feb '20, 13:57) H_mlet

It does appear for me when I follow your link. If you press the details button you get to the data page of the bus stop. There it shows you five different hamlets around the location, of which Cascina Gioia is the closest.

I'm not saying it makes much sense to name such small hamlet for a feature inside a city. But then again the search engine is used globally and there are probably enough locations out there where finding the nearest village does make an awful lot of sense. I wouldn't call it a bug but just not enough differentiation done depending on location. But the active developer team of the tool is small and I guess changing this behavior is rather on the lower end of priorities.

(18 Feb '20, 14:45) TZorn

Ok, so in the end this is just a bug on how the infos are read, and they are fine as it is. My main concern is that I use a Telegram bot who gives info based on coordinates and it reply with the same results of Nominatim.

(19 Feb '20, 12:24) DaRk_ViVi

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question asked: 17 Feb '20, 14:32

question was seen: 1,398 times

last updated: 19 Feb '20, 14:08

NOTICE: help.openstreetmap.org is no longer in use from 1st March 2024. Please use the OpenStreetMap Community Forum