java - free location service - street by name

Question

Does anyone knows any free location services that will allow me to find streets according to cities in Israel? I can use any java, .NET or javascript api.

Answer 1

OSM Nominatim is probably your best bet if you want to search for a street within a city.

The nominatim.openstreetmap.org servers have a somewhat restrictive usage policy; MapQuest also provides the Nominatim service without usage limits.

If you're planning on a very high volume of queries, you'll be better off installing Nominatim on your own servers, but be warned that this is not a trivial task, and the dataset is approaching a terabyte in size.

If you're looking for a list of streets, there's a few options. The easiest is to use mapsomatic to generate a CSV, but this is manual and only works if you need one or two cities.

It's more complicated if you need more than one city:

1. download osmosis (and perhaps osmembrane which is a beta GUI for osmosis)
2. download your country extract netherlands.osm.pbf (~430MB)
3. create a polygon file parseable by osmois (see osm2polygon)
4. run osmosis with the polygon and extract all ways that have the tags name=* and highway=residential
   1. way-key name,highway
   2. tag filter reject-node, reject-relation