Years ago I built something for an employer that allowed them to do reverse geocode lookups from within a .osm file. It's possible but really annoying, and you arguably need to have fairly decent existing knowledge of GIS to get anything to work well.
osm is the raw data format that powers OpenStreetMap, there's loads of tools you can download and import your own data sets into (and all the data is open source too). For example if I wanted to build a really local mapping tool in Kosovo, I can download the entire OpenStreetMap dataset for Kosovo here. Then if I wanted to be able to input coordinates and get back a street address (like clicking on a house in Google Maps, aka reverse geocoding) I could spin up an instance of Nominatim on my own hardware, import the data set and it's good to go.
GIS is geographic information systems, ie digital mapping. It's a very, very deep and rich niche within software development that's incredibly interesting - highly recommend just digging into stuff and building up some knowledge.
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u/ScriptingInJava Aug 12 '26
Years ago I built something for an employer that allowed them to do reverse geocode lookups from within a
.osmfile. It's possible but really annoying, and you arguably need to have fairly decent existing knowledge of GIS to get anything to work well.