Reverse geocoding

Reverse geocoding is the process of converting geographic coordinates into a human-readable address. By default, Dawarich provides reverse geocoding functionality using the Nominatim service. This service is free to use, but it has some limitations, such as the number of requests per second. If you have a lot of points in your location history data, the reverse geocoding process might take some time.

How to enable reverse geocoding

To enable reverse geocoding, you need to set the REVERSE_GEOCODING_ENABLED environment variable to true in the docker-compose.yml file. Here is an example of how to do it:

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version: '3'
networks:
  dawarich:
services:
  dawarich_app:
    image: freikin/dawarich:latest
    ...
    environment:
      RAILS_ENV: development
      ...
      APPLICATION_PROTOCOL: http
      REVERSE_GEOCODING_ENABLED: true # or false to disable reverse geocoding
    logging:
    ...
  dawarich_sidekiq:
    image: freikin/dawarich:latest
    ...
    environment:
      RAILS_ENV: development
      ...
      APPLICATION_PROTOCOL: http
      REVERSE_GEOCODING_ENABLED: true # or false to disable reverse geocoding
    logging:
    ...

Setting up your own reverse geocoding service

This feature was added in Dawarich 0.9.10.

If you want to use your own reverse geocoding service, you can do it by deploying your own instance of the Photon service by Komoot on your server. You can run it in Docker, using a guide from Ton Snoei. After you deploy your own instance of the Photon service, you need to set the PHOTON_API_HOST environment variable to the URL of your Photon service in the docker-compose.yml file. Here is an example of how to do it:

Show me!

version: '3'
networks:
  dawarich:
services:
  dawarich_app:
    image: freikin/dawarich:latest
    ...
    environment:
      RAILS_ENV: development
      ...
      APPLICATION_PROTOCOL: http
      REVERSE_GEOCODING_ENABLED: true
      PHOTON_API_HOST: photon.yourdomain.com # remove this line if you want to use the default Nominatim service
    logging:
    ...
  dawarich_sidekiq:
    image: freikin/dawarich:latest
    ...
    environment:
      RAILS_ENV: development
      ...
      APPLICATION_PROTOCOL: http
      REVERSE_GEOCODING_ENABLED: true
      PHOTON_API_HOST: photon.yourdomain.com # remove this line if you want to use the default Nominatim service
    logging:
    ...

Important note: since Geocoder, the library used in Dawarich for reverse geocoding, uses only HTTPS for requests, you need to make sure that your Photon service is available over HTTPS.

Reverse geocoding and importing process.

When you import your location history data, the reverse geocoding process starts for each point imported. The Sidekiq queues will be filled with reverse geocoding jobs, and there will be a lot of them, depending on how many points you imported. Important thing to understand, is that although the queue will be filled with jobs, the importing process itself is not dependent on the reverse geocoding process. The reverse geocoding process is done in the background even when importing process is finished.

Before Dawarich 0.9.0 the reverse geocoding process was fetching only city and country value for each point. Starting 0.9.0, a lot more data is fetched for each point, including street, house number, postal code, and more. This change was made to provide more detailed information about each point.

Here is an example of data that is fetched for each point:

{
  "place_id": 127850637,
  "licence": "Data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0. http://osm.org/copyright",
  "osm_type": "way",
  "osm_id": 718035022,
  "lat": "52.51450815",
  "lon": "13.350110811262352",
  "class": "historic",
  "type": "monument",
  "place_rank": 30,
  "importance": 0.4155071896625501,
  "addresstype": "historic",
  "name": "Victory Column",
  "display_name": "Victory Column, Großer Stern, Botschaftsviertel, Tiergarten, Mitte, Berlin, 10785, Germany",
  "address": {
    "historic": "Victory Column",
    "road": "Großer Stern",
    "neighbourhood": "Botschaftsviertel",
    "suburb": "Tiergarten",
    "borough": "Mitte",
    "city": "Berlin",
    "ISO3166-2-lvl4": "DE-BE",
    "postcode": "10785",
    "country": "Germany",
    "country_code": "de"
  },
  "boundingbox": [
    "52.5142449",
    "52.5147775",
    "13.3496725",
    "13.3505485"
  ]
}

Later on, reverse geocode data will be used to provide more insights into your location history data, as well as to provide more detailed information about your points on the map.