turkmenistan_addresses

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Offline address search for Turkmenistan: 1,941 settlements (52 of them cities), 3,166 streets, 7,091 houses and 3,282 public places — airports, stations, hospitals, ministries, markets. The database is built from OpenStreetMap and ships inside the package — no network is used at load time or at query time.

The asset is 391 KB.

On pub.dev: pub.dev/packages/turkmenistan_addresses

Installation

dependencies:
  turkmenistan_addresses: ^1.1.0

Usage

import 'package:turkmenistan_addresses/turkmenistan_addresses.dart';

final db = await loadTurkmenistanAddresses();
db.warmUp(); // optional; moves 30 ms off the first query

for (final hit in db.search('par 2/4 1')) {
  print('${hit.title} — ${hit.place?.name}  ${hit.lat}, ${hit.lon}');
}
// Parahat 2/4, 1 — Aşgabat  37.8981436, 58.385109

A result is destructured by kind:

switch (hit) {
  case PlaceHit(:final value):   // city, village, neighbourhood
    print('${value.name}, ${value.type}');
  case StreetHit(:final value):  // street
    print(db.housesOn(value.id).length);
  case AddressHit(:final value): // house
    print('${value.street.name}, ${value.number}');
}

There is also nearestAddress(lat, lon), addressesNear(lat, lon) and housesOn(streetId).

Public places

What people search for instead of an address — howa menzili (the airport), Gulistan bazary, Altyn Asyr — has a search of its own:

for (final poi in db.searchPublicPlaces('howa asgabat')) {
  print('${poi.name} (${poi.category.name}) — ${poi.place?.name}');
}
// Aşgabat Halkara Howa Menzili (airport) — Aşgabat

It is kept apart from search on purpose: a new kind of SearchHit would break every exhaustive switch over the results. Show the two lists side by side, or merge them the way your screen needs — by distance from the user, for instance.

PublicPlaceCategory has thirty categories, from airport and railwayStation to pharmacy and fuel; the order is the ranking (an airport before a pharmacy of the same name). No label comes with a category — word it in the language you display. Also there: publicPlacesNear(lat, lon), publicPlacesOf(category) and a categories: filter on both searches.

Cafés and ordinary shops are left out: there are thousands of them and nobody searches the country for one.

A working example lives in example/: search as you type, the list of houses on a street, and a house card showing where its street came from.

cd example && flutter run

How the search works

Every word of the query must be the start of some word in the entry, and their order does not matter. That is why par 2/4 1 finds Parahat 2/4, 1: demanding the comma and the exact spelling is no good when people type from memory, on the move.

Matching from mid-word is rejected on purpose — rahat will not find Parahat, or the results fill up with accidental hits.

Diacritics are folded: Turkmen names use ä, ç, ň, ö, ş, ü, ý and nobody is going to type them, so gorogly finds Görogly köçesi. The slash and the hyphen survive folding — they are part of house numbers: 2/4, 12-а.

A street's search key carries its settlement, so gorogly kocesi gyzylarbat separates one Görogly köçesi from the nine others in different towns and villages.

Ranking, in order: an exact prefix of the whole entry → a match in the name versus a match in the settlement → the weight of the entry (city → village → street → house) → shorter name before longer. That is why mary gives you the city of Mary first, not houses on a street named Mary in Ashgabat.

There is deliberately no spatial or prefix index: with thirteen thousand entries a full scan takes about a millisecond — less than one frame. Loading copies nothing; the sections stay views over the asset's buffer.

Measured under flutter test (JIT; release is faster):

parsing the file	4 ms
first query (builds the keys)	33 ms, removed by warmUp()
query	0.8–1.4 ms
query over public places	0.4 ms
nearestAddress	0.2 ms

What to expect from the data

The data is OSM, with everything that implies.

For 23% of houses the street was inferred, not recorded. addr:street is present on 5,452 houses out of 7,091; the rest got their street from the nearest road within 150 m. The flag is Address.streetIsExact — showing the address is fine either way, but claiming that OSM says so is only fine in the first case.

Houses whose street could not be determined were dropped — 390 of them. A bare number is unsearchable: "house 12" exists in every block.

The country has far more houses than this. The extract holds 160,149 buildings and 95% of them carry no addr:housenumber at all. No amount of processing will show a number that is not in OSM.

Only what lies inside the border is kept. The extract reaches across it, and its bounding box holds Mashhad and half of Khorezm; the builder checks the country's border polygon itself.

A public place without a name is dropped — 1,875 of them: an unnamed pharmacy cannot be searched for. One mapped twice (an airport's outline and its terminal node, a station node and its building) is kept once.

Identical numbers on different houses are kept — they are more than half the database. Collapsing them would be wrong: Parahat 4 has seven different buildings numbered "2". What is collapsed is a single house mapped twice — a building outline plus an address node inside it — otherwise every such house appears in the results twice.

Rebuilding

The finished database is in assets/; you only need to rebuild it to pick up fresher OSM data. You will need a Turkmenistan extract in .pbf format (from download.geofabrik.de, for instance). It is not kept in the repository: 25 MB of input against 391 KB of output.

python3 -m venv tool/.venv && tool/.venv/bin/pip install osmium   # once
tool/.venv/bin/python tool/build_address_db.py turkmenistan.pbf \
    assets/turkmenistan.adb

The build takes about a minute — most of it stitching the border — and prints exactly what it dropped and why.

The format is described in tool/address_db_format.py; lib/src/address_db.dart is a paired implementation of the same layout. Change one and you must change the other, raising FORMAT_VERSION / AddressDatabase.formatVersion together: the loader refuses a version it does not know rather than reading garbage (version 1 files, from before public places, still open). The same goes for diacritic folding and the kept-punctuation set — let them drift apart and typed text stops meeting the stored names, silently and completely.

License

Code — MIT, see LICENSE.

The data in assets/turkmenistan.adb comes from OpenStreetMap and is distributed under the ODbL — see NOTICE. An application using it must credit © OpenStreetMap contributors.