Photon is an open source geocoder built for OpenStreetMap data. It is based on Apache Solr - an efficient and highly scalable search platform.

Photon was developed by komoot and provides multilingual (currently english and german) and search-as-you-type geocoder, a real life demo can be seen on www.komoot.de

The project consistes of three parts:

1. Solr configuration
2. Converter that creates a solr xml file from a Nominatim database (Java)
3. Testing environment for developing (Java)

Photon needs a dataset (addresses, streets, cities, ...). Solr provides numerous input formats, including xml. Currently you cannot convert an OpenStreetMap planet file to use it with photon. Instead you can use the NominatorImporter included in this project to dump a nominatim database to a xml file. Refer to Nominatim's Installation Guide how to setup and fill a postgis database. It takes up to 10 days and sufficient RAM to import the entire world, you might prefer taking a smaller region.

Once you have a nominatim database you can run the NominatorImporter to create the solr index

mvn compile exec:java -Dexec.mainClass=de.komoot.photon.importer.NominatimImporter -Dexec.args="...args..."

command line arguments

• -h postgis database host, e.g. localhost
• -d database name, usually Nominatim
• -u username of database user
• -P password of database user
• -p database port, optional default value is 5432
• -f path of xml output file, e.g. /Users/christoph/berlin.sorl.xml.gz

A complete example:

mvn compile exec:java -Dexec.mainClass=de.komoot.photon.importer.NominatimImporter -Dexec.args="-h localhost -d nominatim_island -u christoph -P christoph -f /Users/christoph/iceland.solr.xml.gz" > /home/christoph/island_import.log

This will take some time (Europe ~ 12 hours).

If you just want to check out photon you can use our example dump of Iceland too (src/main/solrindex/iceland.solr.xml.gz).

You need to install Apache Solr (tested with version 4.4). Using Mac OS X and homebrew you can type:

brew install solr

Start solr and pass the configuration directory that ist part of the project src/main/solrconfig/

solr /Users/christoph/komoot/solr4/src/main/solrconfig/

Check Solr's admin interface on https://localhost:8983/solr/

You can already query for places but no search results will be found as we have not imported any data yet. To do so we need to type:

curl "https://localhost:8983/solr/collection1/update?commit=true" -F stream.file=/Users/christoph/iceland.solr.xml
curl "https://localhost:8983/solr/collection1/update" -F stream.body=' <optimize />'

Don't forget to unzip the xml file first.

Now solr is up and running and filled with data. You can start searching for places:

https://localhost:8983/solr/collection1/select?q=reykjavik

Join us in improving photon and feel free to contact us!

For developping we used a test-based approch, the test environment and testcases are located in src/main/java/de/komoot/search/tests/. Every test consists of a xml file (test data) and csv file (test definition).

Photon software is open soucre and licensed under Apache License, Version 2.0