#OSMNames open-source project which provides a basic place search / geocoding functionality. It is a lightweight search system powered by full-text engine with world-wide coverage. At the moment it is limited to place names like streets, towns, cities, administrative units, countries, etc.. It can be extended in future with other place types like lake or mountain names and even with POIs. The enhancement with postal addresses (house numbers and zip codes) is also possible.
The core of the OSMNames project is the pre-processed data. It comes in easy to handle text format, the #TSV (tab separated value). This allows filtering with UNIX text processing tools (grep, sed, awk, less, cut, etc.) and direct indexing via a full-text search engine.
The project comes with an open-source server software providing a place search API suitable for a basic #geocoder with autocomplete functionality. The server is written in Python and is powered by the high-performance C++ open-source full-text engine called #Sphinx Search.
Here you can download the pre-generated data with over 21 million place names for the whole planet.
The open-source code for generating the data is available in the repository ▻https://github.com/osmnames/osmnames
The Place Search API used in this website is implemented with the open-source project available at ▻https://github.com/klokantech/osmnames-sphinxsearch
