Frequently Asked Questions

It was launched in June 2008.

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It is geography for GIS (aka Geographic Information System).

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It has been tested on several machines using Linux, Windows and various JVMs. Gisgraphy has a high unit/integration test coverage. it is scalable, and have no memory leak (

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No. Really! Gisgraphy can be installed for free, and so does the data. We provide Premium services for those who don't want to run a (long) import of data or want to acquire our consolidated database from several open data sources.

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Yes sure. Gisgraphy import Openstreetmap and Openaddresses datasets.

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The import is long because :

• There are a lot of features to import (more than 100 Million)
• Gisgraphy tries to do error correction to detect the correct ADM, and a lot of requests are done to the database for each line. this is the "price to pay" to have a parent/child ADM tree
• For each feature or alternate names imported, the full-text engine is synchronized.
• A lot of requests to the fulltext engine (45 000 000 to search the nearest city for each street) and the geoloc one (to search the nearest city for each zip code)

The openstreetmap import takes less time because data are pre-processed (length, middle point,...) to CSV. so no error correction is necessary.

Some improvements have been made in V 5.0 to decrease the time the import takes (25% less).since V 4.0 but the data has been multiplying by 10.
You should take care of the options you choose when importing, you may not need all the functionalities. Read the explanations on options and choose them according your needs can drastically decrease the time the importer takes. If you've got some suggestions to improve the importer, feel free to contribute.

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Yes! Just choose the dataset(s) you are interested in on the confirm import page.

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Edit the importer.filesToDownload option in the env.properties file. Set the country you want to download, then start gisgraphy, go to the admin menu=>run import or, if you don't want Gisgraphy to download files; set the importer.retrieveFiles option to false and put the files you want to process in the 'importer.geonames.dir' directory.

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It depends on the machine and the memory. On a core I7 it takes about one month. The importer is useful if you are interested in a custom import(specific place types, countries, dataset...), If you don't want to run an import by yourself because you are interested in all place types for all countries, a Postgres dump and a Solr dump can be ordered here. it will take only the time to inject the dump into Postgres and copy the Solr dump into the solr directory (~3 hours)

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Yes, you can see that the project is active on Github

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Java / Spring / Hibernate / Hibernate Spatial / Maven 2 / PostGIS / PostgreSQL / struts2 / SolR-Lucene.

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No (and it will never be). Oracle is commercial and it does not follow open source philosophy, and MySQL needs MyISAM database. You can not do GIS with MySQL and InnoDB. There is a real limitation because foreign keys are missing in MyISAM.

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Gisgraphy is designed and have been tested for Java 1.5 and later.

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Because the data are pre-processed : we extract streets, calculate the length, the middle point, clean up some values, improve names (especially for fleet tracking), etc. We also think that it is simpler to import CSV files, instead of a more complicated XML format ;)

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It is due to SolR < = > Unix, you need to update the maximum number of allowed open files on your system. See this link and this one for help.

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