I just recently spent a few hours working with OSM and Nominatim as part of a project for my university, an event planning page for ActivityPub social media: http://fedevent.herokuapp.com/
OSM maps are quite detailed, perfectly serviceable...but Nominatim is not very good (at least in my experience?) I used https://github.com/perliedman/leaflet-control-geocoder to interact with Nominatim but entering something that can sound relatively common (like a mall or an abbreviation of an institution) will come up with locations in entirely different countries than the user had in mind and at least in the case of that geocoder control (props to the dev for making it, BTW) there isn't a clear way to determine WHERE something is before selecting it.
I noticed this when I searched for "Mall San Pedro" and was returned the right location but it was displayed as something completely different, under the name of the street. It's a little disconnecting.
I appreciate that it might come down the libraries and tools that are querying Nominatim with certain design decisions, but the useful of a database is in the implementation of it into tools.
This looks useful for the purposes of describing areas in detail but setting an event usually doesn't require more than a couple pins to show where it takes place.
I will keep this handy for any future geomapping projects I work on (which sounds like a possibility given that this was interesting to work with)
Overpass turbo is a great tool, but it's not in the same category as a geocoder like nominatim. Overpass is for querying OSM objects, not parsing addresses.
OSM maps are quite detailed, perfectly serviceable...but Nominatim is not very good (at least in my experience?) I used https://github.com/perliedman/leaflet-control-geocoder to interact with Nominatim but entering something that can sound relatively common (like a mall or an abbreviation of an institution) will come up with locations in entirely different countries than the user had in mind and at least in the case of that geocoder control (props to the dev for making it, BTW) there isn't a clear way to determine WHERE something is before selecting it.
I noticed this when I searched for "Mall San Pedro" and was returned the right location but it was displayed as something completely different, under the name of the street. It's a little disconnecting.
I appreciate that it might come down the libraries and tools that are querying Nominatim with certain design decisions, but the useful of a database is in the implementation of it into tools.