curtisy1 / OSMeili

(Reverse) Geocoding backed by meilisearch

OSMeili

A (reverse-)geocoder backed by meilisearch

What

This is a geocoder similar to the likes of Photon or mimirsbrunn the difference between them is quite significant for a few reasons:

• It uses meilisearch as it's backing store instead of Elasticsearch
  This makes it both more future-proof in terms of licensing and more performant

• It's very simple and only does basic geocoding and reverse geocoding
  At the moment, it only considers OSM nodes, not streets (ways) or administrative boundaries. This was done to reduce complexity in the hopes that quality will be good enough.
  Should the quality be lacking, features like boundaries will gradually be added.

• It's relatively fast and lightweight
  Importing the extract of Germany (4Gb) takes ~250Mb of memory and roughly 5 minutes.¹
  Planet scale imports take ~500Mb of memory and ~2 hours²

• It does not do automatic updates yet. This will be added in a future version

• It can be easily tweaked to only import what you really need
  Since different people have different needs, you can filter for specific OSM tags you want to include. By default, all addr keys are considered

• You can bring your own parser or use the default (tbd)
  Thanks to being tweak-able, you can choose whether you want to build your own client and interact directly with the meilisearch API or use the default wrapper using the defaults from 6.

• Native container support (tbd)
  Simply use the image in your spec and get everything running in minutes

Why

Nominatim is great, but it doesn't do fuzzy search. Photon being Java + Elastic turned out to be slow in multiple test cases, plus it uses an old version of Elastic for licensing reasons.

Mimirsbrunn looked very promising until Hove closed-sourced it. So far none of the forks seem to have continued the development effort, so it is pretty much dead. Plus, it's also using Elastic.

I took this as an opportunity to learn more about Rust, meilisearch and OSM, hoping it could one day become a viable alternative (truth be told, it's still very far from it)

Future

A non-exhaustive list of things that are currently missing

• Importing from URL or local file (planned)
• Updating entries based on set frequency (planned)
• Default API client handling meili interaction (planned)
• Status page (planned)
• Docker/Kubernetes packaging & deployment instructions (planned)
• Offer admin boundaries and streets (contributions welcome)

Special thanks

• Magnus Kulke for his initial work on osm-pbf2json which this project is based on³
• Giora Kosoi from navigatorsguild for osm-io they also have a similar project trying to replace Nominatim, check it out

License

This work is dual-licensed under MIT and EUPL 1.2. You must accept with both of them if you use this work.

SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT AND EUPL-1.2

Footnotes

1. "Measured with an M1 Macbook Pro running Linux, let me know of your experience" ↩

2. The import itself takes around 50% of the time. After the import is done, indexes are tweaked for better search result quality. If you do not need this, you can disable it. ↩

3. All code created by original authors is licensed under MIT. See LICENSE.MIT for details ↩