OSM Names

Database of geographic place names from OpenStreetMap for full text search downloadable for free. Website: http://osmnames.org Does include hierarchy information without house numbers or zip codes.

Target of the project

• Downloadable gazeteer data a la GeoNames.org: http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/ but each record has bounding box and an importance rank known from Nominatim
• Data are derived primarily from OpenStreetMap
• The data format is simple to use tab-delimited text in utf8 encoding (as geonames.org). First line has column names.
• Different type of records are stored in different files (download and index just what you need, sometimes you don't need POIs or addresses with house numbers)
• Possible to generate from a country specific extract of Open Street Map (together with vector tiles)

Why to make this

• Direct indexing via fulltext search engines (SphinxSearch, ElasticSearch, etc.)
• Simple process to get a basic search in place names on a map within minutes
• Downloading the basic gazeteer data from OSM in usable format is problematic now (a need to process large OSM Planet files)

Sample search server

• Powered by super fast open-source fulltext Sphinxsearch - inspired by Swiss GeoAdmin search service
• JSON/JSONP API similar to Nominatim: nominatim.openstreetmap.org
• Ready to use via Docker in minutes
• https://github.com/klokantech/osmnames-sphinxsearch
• osmnames.klokantech.com/

Data format of tsv export of OSMNames

name 				the name of the feature (default language is en, others available(de,es,fr,ru,zh))
alternative_names	all other available and distinct names separated by commas
osm_type			the osm type of this feature (node, way, relation)
osm_id				
class				
type
lon
lat
place_rank			rank from 1-30 ascending depending on the type and class
importance			importance [0.0-1.0] depending on wikipedia if available otherwise just the ranking
street 				
city
county
state	
country	
country_code		ISO-3166 2-letter country code
display_name		the display name representing the hierarchy
west				bbox
south				bbox
east				bbox
north				bbox
wikidata			the wikidata associated with this feature
wikipedia 			the wikipedia URL associated with this feature

REMARKs:

• Fields like housenumber and postalcode don't belong to this dataset.

Data

The world extract can be downloaded here: https://github.com/geometalab/OSMNames/releases/download/v1.1/planet-latest.tsv.gz

If you want to extract only the information for a specific country, you can use the following command

awk -F $'\t' 'BEGIN {OFS = FS}{if (NR!=1) {  if ($16 =="[country_code]")  { print}    } else {print}}' planet-latest.tsv > countryExtract.tsv

where country_code is the ISO-3166 2-letter country code.

Get Started

You need a complete OSM PBF data dump either from a country extract or of the entire world. Download the data and put it into the data directory.

wget --directory-prefix=./data http://download.geofabrik.de/europe/switzerland-latest.osm.pbf

Alternatively there is a docker-compose, just edit FILE_URL in download-pbf.sh accordingly

docker-compose run download-pbf

Now we need to set up the database and import the data using the import-osm Docker container.

# This will automatically initialize the database
docker-compose up -d postgres

# Import additional wikipedia data to the ./data folder
docker-compose run import-wikipedia

Create the database schema

docker-compose run schema

Import the pbf file from the data folder

# Import the OSM data dump from the ./data folder
docker-compose run import-osm

We can now export the ranked geonames and their geometries.

docker-compose run export-osmnames

Components

The different components that attach to the postgres container are all located in the src directory.

Component	Description
postgres	PostGIS data store for OSM data and to perform noise analysis
download-pbf	automatically downloads the pbf file
import-wikipedia	Imports wikipedia data for more accurate importance calculation
import-osm	Imposm3 based import tool with custom mapping to import selective OSM into the database and reconstruct it as GIS geometries, handles indexing and hierarchy reconstruction
export-osmnames	Export names and their bounding boxes to TSV datasets
schema	Contains views, tables, functions for the schema