In this episode Ed chats with Sarah Hoffmann, long time OpenStreetMap contributor, software developer, and the primary maintainer of Nominatim, the main OpenStreetMap geocoding software. We go deep on the difficulty of geocoding - especially on top of an every-changing, crowdsourced data set like OpenStreetMap. Nominatim is immensely powerful, handling about 400 requests per second as the search on openstreetmap.org. Sarah explains the tech stack, and also the challenges of managing such a technically complex and publicly visible open-source project.

 

At OpenCage we rely heavily on Nominatim and are delighted to help support Sarah's work financially - and of course also with code contributions.

 

Interested in geocoding? Please get involved with Nominatim.

 

Show notes on the Geomob website.