OSMNames project offers a downloadable list of place names derived from the OpenStreetMap database with easy installation, transparent licensing, and clean code.
Every gazetteer record comes with the coverage area (bounding box), administrative hierarchy, several identifiers, alternative names, and precalculated rank derived from related Wikipedia page popularity.
The TSV (tab-separated value) data format simplifies the handling of the community-curated data with over 21 million streets, towns, cities, and administrative units from every country all over the world. A complete compressed dump has only about 1.5 gigabytes.
The dataset is optimized for indexing by fulltext search engines (such as SphinxSearch or ElasticSearch). It can power a geocoding service similar to the open-source Nominatim that served as a reference implementation, especially regarding the hierarchy of places, bbox, and ranking.
The OSMNames data set was optimized and tested to feed the place search system of MapTiler AG, Switzerland, which allows to search for a geographic location name and zoom a map to the proper position. The search system is available under an open-source license and can be easily installed on a custom server completely free of charge.
Are you in need of a complete search engine that includes geographic locations like lakes, mountains, points of interest (POIs), zip codes, postal addresses, etc? Use the geocoding API or incorporate the Geocoding Control into your web applications effortlessly. This can be done using vanilla JS, React, Svelte, and your preferred map library such as MapTiler SDK JS, Leaflet, OpenLayers, or MapLibre GL JS.
This initial release of the OSMNames project provides only place names for a basic search of street names, towns, cities, and other administrative units. It can be extended in the future with other place types like lakes, mountain names, and even POIs.
An enhancement with complete postal addresses (house numbers and zip codes) is also possible but will need further research.
Right now, the data is always pre-generated to simplify deployment and scalability. You could also use the same fulltext search indexing system and ranking against a PostgreSQL database with nearly live updates.
The original OSMNames open-source project generating the dataset from OpenStreetMap is a result of the work of a semester thesis (Andreas Egloff) from the University of Applied Sciences Rapperswil, Switzerland, and was done in cooperation with MapTiler AG. The company team has developed the open-source search system with autocomplete (instant search) functionality.
Anybody can reuse the open-source software, customize the data and adapt our workflows. We hope the community will contribute back and help us improve this database.
Do you need geocoding API or Maps API with SLA and commercial support? Try maps for developers by MapTiler.
OSMNames project is maintained by the OSM community, Geometa Lab HSR, and MapTiler.
