Hi Rahul, and welcome to GSoC.
On Mon, Mar 23, 2020 at 05:18:23PM +0000, Rahul Reddy wrote: > I am K Rahul Reddy, third year Computer Science student at National Institute > of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, India. I have been going through > Nominatim source code and the proposed GSoC projects. I would like to work on > the Search suggestions project. I am currently familiarizing myself with the > photon project and going through the FSA data representation demonstrated in > https://blog.burntsushi.net/transducers/. I’ll share my proposal draft if the > project is available. > > Please let me know if the project is available. Yes, the project is definitly still available. Here is a bit more background to it: The target audience for osm.org is first of all mappers. For the search box that means that mappers should be able to immediately find new data that they have just entered into OpenStreetMap. And given that OSM is a world-wide database, it has to work in any language. Providing a minutely updated database is actually quite a difficult requirement to fulfil, both for the implementation and for resource use. So my suggestion here would be to work around the problem by really only providing suggestions through the new service but do the actual lookup still through the Nominatim API. So somebody would start typing and get a number of suggestions from the new service. If the user choses one of them, we'd send the suggested string to the Nominatim API and get results based on the latest OSM data. With such a setup, it would be okay, if the database for suggestion is a week or two behind the latest OSM data. That means that it would be okay to create a new static database every one or two weeks and use that. It might simplify the task. We also have some technical constraints. Search is currently powered by two servers. We used to have one in active production and the other as cold standby. The plan always was that the standby server should be used to provide the suggestion database and API. Due to the increased load we now have both in production. I'd still speculate for this project that we will get a third server and we have a cold standby for search suggestions once more. Creating or updating the database should not interfere too much with such a server. It is okay to stop updating the server with new OSM data for a couple of hours to create a new suggestions database but it shouldn't take days. There is no hard requirement to use photon for the project but the suggestions must be based on the Nominatim database to ensure that suggestion and search API deliver similar enough results to not confuse the user. Photon can already deliver on that. So, my suggestion would be to start from Photon and set up quickly a prototype of search with suggestions. Then however, I would suggest to fork photon and concetrate on developing a version that is specifically geared at providing suggestions. Photon is a full-featured geo-search engine and contains a lot of data and code that is not required for the task. The smaller the database can be made in the end, the better. That was quite a bit of information but I hope it helps you understand a bit better the scope of the project. Feel free to ask about more details if parts are still unclear. Kind regards Sarah _______________________________________________ Geocoding mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/geocoding
