photon

Photon is an open source geocoder built for OpenStreetMap data. It is based on elasticsearch - an efficient, powerful and highly scalable search platform.

Photon was started by komoot and provides search-as-you-type and multilingual support. It's used in production with thousands of requests per minute at www.komoot.de.

The current version is still under heavy development, feel free to test and participate. The previous version based on solr is accessible in the deprecated solr branch.

Features

• high performance
• highly scalability
• search-as-you-type
• multilingual search
• location bias
• typo tolerance
• OSM data import (built upon Nominatim) inclusive continuous updates

Prerequisites

• Java 6
• Maven
• Python 2/3 (currently necessary for API)
• Nominatim (currently necessary for continuous updates)

Installation

git clone git@github.com:komoot/photon.git
cd photon
mvn clean package

Usage

Import Data

To import worldwide data in four languages (English, German, French and Italian) you can use our preprocessed dataset. You won't be able to continuously update your data to keep them in sync with the latest OSM changes. However you avoid to install and import Nominatim which is time consuming.

Simply start photon

java -jar target/photon-importer-0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar

and load the global dataset by calling

curl http://localhost:4567/dump/import # not working yet!

Be aware that you download several GB of data, the import itself will take only a few minutes.

Import Data (inclusive continuous updates)

If you need continuous updates or want to import country extracts only, you need to install Nominatim by yourself. Once this is done you can start the data importer:

java -jar target/photon-importer-0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar -nominatim-import -host localhost -port 5432 -database nominatim -user nominatim -password ...

The import will take some hours/days, ssd disk are recommended to accelerate nominatim queries.

TODO: missing docu for continuous updates

Start Photon

java -jar target/photon-importer-0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar

Run the Demo UI

The python demo UI is located in website/photon.

It has been developed with python3.4 (but should work with python2.x). We suggest to use virtualenv for the installation.

• Get the virtualenv system packages:

  sudo apt-get install python-pip python-virtualenv virtualenvwrapper
  

• Create a virtualenv:

mkvirtualenv -p python3.4 photon

• Install dependencies:

cd website/photon
pip install -r requirements.txt

• Run the server

python app.py

• Go to http://localhost:5001/ and test it!

Licence

Photon software is open source and licensed under Apache License, Version 2.0