OpenCage Geocoder ๐Ÿ‘‰๐ŸŒ Profile picture
Oct 8, 2021 โ€ข 10 tweets โ€ข 4 min read โ€ข Read on X
Time to celebrate. ๐Ÿฅณ We hit a nice milestone last week when @theHyphyDude submitted a pull request on our address-formatting project. The PR added a link to a #golang project that uses our templates.

So what is address-formatting?
github.com/OpenCageData/aโ€ฆ

๐ŸŒ๐Ÿงต๐Ÿ‘‡
2/ Here's the problem: addresses all over the world are different. Different countries do things differently, and sometimes there are even differences within countries. Image
3/ Meanwhile the global OpenStreetMap community is continually collecting all kinds of data about the world, which is great. ๐Ÿ’ช๐Ÿ—บ๏ธ This can go to intense detail: every tree, park bench, foot path, etc. That's great, but ... Image
4/ When someone sends our API a geocoding request, we look in the database and see all kinds of stuff. We need to sift through it, and turn it into a well formatted address that matches the local way of presenting addresses that makes sense for that location.
5/ Sounds simple, but many services get it wrong. We call this the "Berlin, Berlin" bug. In the US ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ it is normal to show <city>, <state>. In Germany ๐Ÿ‡ฉ๐Ÿ‡ช, Berlin is both a city and a state, but no one ever refers to "Berlin, Berlin". Only American services do that. Image
6/ Subtle i18n details like this add up to make a service feel natural and easy to use (or not).

When it's not right it's like the tiny stone in your shoe ๐Ÿชจ๐Ÿ‘Ÿ that keeps annoying you.

address-formatting is our open source project to know how to make addresses look right
7/ the address-formatting project is a collection of templates that let us know how to display an address for each country/territory (248 in total) in the world ๐ŸŒ

github.com/OpenCageData/aโ€ฆ
8/ The address-formatting templates themselves can be used in any programming language, with last week's PR adding #golang there are now 10 different parsers. ๐Ÿฅณ Yeah, open source! Image
9/ most importantly we have hundreds of tests. We're always adding more, and welcome your suggestions. There is no shortage of global addressing edge cases.

You can see address-formatting in action in the "formatted" string in our geocoding API results Image
Hope you enjoyed this week's peek behind the curtain ๐ŸชŸ at life at a geocoding service.

We have many more geothreads about border disputes, exclaves, reverse geocoding, etc listed on our blog: blog.opencagedata.com/post/geothreadโ€ฆ

Have questions? Get in touch. Image

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More from @OpenCage

Oct 3, 2021
You might have seen that Spain ๐Ÿ‡ช๐Ÿ‡ธ is growing: ๐ŸŒ‹๐Ÿ๏ธ

A perfect time to continue our geoweirdness thread series with a look at Spain

๐ŸŒโ‰๏ธ๐Ÿ‘‡
2/ First up, most people think Spain ๐Ÿ‡ช๐Ÿ‡ธ is only in Europe, but Spain has two โ€œCiudades autรณnomasโ€ in northern Africa : Cueta and Melilla en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceuta
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melilla ImageImage
3/ Spain ๐Ÿ‡ช๐Ÿ‡ธ also has an enclave completely surrounded France ๐Ÿ‡ซ๐Ÿ‡ท: the village of Llรญvia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ll%C3%ADvโ€ฆ ImageImage
Read 12 tweets
Aug 5, 2021
In this weekโ€™s geo weirdness thread we return to Europe to take a look at Belgium ๐Ÿ‡ง๐Ÿ‡ช

๐Ÿงต๐ŸŒŽโ‰๏ธ
2/ The Kingdom of Belgium has 3 official languages: Dutch, French, German. The country's linguistic diversity leads to a complex internal organization
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communitiโ€ฆ and many places have multiple names
3/ The capital of Belgium ๐Ÿ‡ง๐Ÿ‡ช is Brussels - Bruxelles (fr), Brussel (nl), Brรผssel (de), and it is also the administrative center of the European Union ๐Ÿ‡ช๐Ÿ‡บ, and thus is often referred to as the โ€œthe capital of the EUโ€
Read 12 tweets
Dec 4, 2020
1/ To mix things up a bit on this site, we thought we'd experiment with using Fridays to post the occasional thread about geo topics we're often asked about. Today we'll start with one everyone thinks is simple, but really isn't: reverse geocoding ๐Ÿงต๐Ÿ—บ๏ธโฌ…๏ธ
2/ Reverse geocoding is turning coordinates (lat,lng) into location info. So 51.952659, 7.632473 becomes "Friedrich-Ebert-StraรŸe 7, 48153 Mรผnster, Germany" (OpenCage HQ, as you can see on our demo page). So far, so simple, right? opencagedata.com/demo
3/ First question people ask is "why would I ever need that?" Well, main reason is tracking devices (GPS, etc) capture locations very precisely as coordinates. But one big problem - coords make no sense to humans ... ๐ŸŒ๐Ÿค”๐Ÿค”๐Ÿค”
Read 12 tweets

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