Finding places: an introduction to Nominatim

A technical introduction to Nominatim

About this Event
The talk will start with a short introduction of the OpenStreetMap project and the open-source universe that has developed around it. From there we'll dive into the details of Nominatim, looking into both the general architecture of the software and the design decisions behind it, as well as the specific challenges of searching through a huge geographical database. We'll close with some insights into practical aspects of open-source development and advice on how to get involved.

About the OpenStreetMap project

The OpenStreetMap project is a project to collect free and open map data. Similar to Wikipedia, the data is collected by a community of volunteers, the mappers.

Nominatim is the most popular open-source search engine for data from OpenStreetMap. It powers the search box on the website for the OpenStreetMap project, but it's also used by thousands of others. It can be used online but also installed locally and scales from being a small search engine for a single town to finding places on the whole planet. This talk gives a technical introduction to Nominatim.

Meet the Speaker: Sarah Hoffman

Sarah has been a software developer all her life. In her day job, she mainly works in operating system development. In 2008, she got more involved in open-source software development and maintains a couple of projects : osm2pgsql, pyosmium, photon, waymarkedtrails and Nominatim. She has also been involved in Nominatim's development since 2012, for many years as a spare-time project and since last year, full-time.