Who am I?

I am Rahul, a Computer Science undergraduate student from the National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, India. I am interested in writing code and solving problems.

My preferred type of vacation is a trek. My college is on the western coast of India. We have a splendid view of the beaches, that’s why I go cycling once a month😅 (sometimes more than that).

Interesting fact: Most of my projects in 2019 included music in some or the other form. In 2020, my ventures have been towards Maps.

How did I come across OSM?

In February, I was at a 36-hour hackathon with a team of 3. Our idea involved maps. It was our first time working with Maps, and we decided to use Google Maps API and started with the app.

We implemented with most of the functionality without facing significant hurdles. When we decided to improve the app and involve a few more features, billing struck us hard. We did not have enough time to set up APIs that required billing. I was searching for alternatives. That’s when I first came across OSM. It was too late at that point to switch, so we ended up not using it.

GSoC’20 Project: Add search suggestions on openstreetmap.org.

The complete project proposal can be found here.

OSM’s main search engine Nominatim can not directly support search suggestions for partially written words. Thus, we aim to set up a database to handle suggestions. Moreover, this database needs to meet the following functional requirements:

1. It should be derivable from the Nominatim DB.

2. It should handle various input languages.

3. It should be regularly updatable.

The following are a few non-functional requirements:

1. Accurate suggestions.

2. The Database should be as small as possible.

3. The service should not be overwhelmed by the requests.

Full-text search engines like Elastic Search and Solr are best suited for this task. As a part of the project, these alternatives will be compared and the stack with the best options will be selected for implementation. A proof of concept for the selected components will be done. Once this is successfully done, suggestions will be set up for the website. This will be followed by a set up of test suite and documentation.

I will post diary entries with updates at least once a week.

Thank you for reading!