On 12/01/2009 13:32, Frederik Ramm wrote: > Hi, > > Nicolas Guillaumin wrote: >> Excuse me if it's a silly question (I'm a newbie here), but what about using >> a search engine component instead of SQL queries ? >> I think about Apache Lucene (Java search engine) for example ( >> http://lucene.apache.org/) which seems to me a better solution about >> indexing and searching than SQL requests ? > > Most of these are based on the concept of "documents" that are > "searched", and they don't usually have a spatial component. > > What we need is something that searches for objects in our database of > roughly half a billion elements, ideally also doing things like "a near > b", where position is expressed in coordinates. > > It is not impossible that some of the existing engines could be tweaked > to work but personally I think we're better of investing work in our own > database.
It's not quite the same thing, but it is my intention to use the existing database to produce an HTML gazetteer (hence the URL) which would then be indexed, not by us but by the search engines. Then you'll be able to use Google to search. Doing simple searches for a place could indeed be done with any old search tool and some simple transformations of the of the database/planet file, but as Frederick says, the position dependent, and qualified searching that the namefinder does, plus the sheer mass of the data makes this somewhat inappropriate here. But I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand. The only thing is that the index a project like that generates is a database, so you end up using a database search in the end anyway. David _______________________________________________ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
