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Geographic Coverage & Data Freshness

Coverage​

geocodeme.net is built on OpenStreetMap data served by our own geocoding and routing engines.

The production dataset covers Europe and the five French overseas regions: Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, Mayotte, and Réunion.

Europe is served by a single continental instance built from the official Geofabrik europe extract. The five overseas regions are not part of that extract (Geofabrik cuts them geographically), so each one keeps its own dedicated instance. A region registry routes every request to the right engine; you never have to pick one.

This applies to all endpoints:

EndpointCoverage
/v1/geocodeAddresses and places in all covered regions
/v1/reverseCoordinates in all covered regions, overseas regions included
/v1/autocompleteSearch-as-you-type in all covered regions
/v1/routeRouting graph spanning Europe and the five overseas regions
/v1/isochroneSame routing graph as /v1/route
/v1/matrixSame routing graph as /v1/route
/v1/elevationTerrain elevation for all covered regions
/v1/matchRoad network in all covered regions
/v1/nearestRoad network in all covered regions
/v1/batch/geocodeSame dataset as /v1/geocode
Map tiles (raster & vector)Rendered from the European extract; see Map Tiles

Routing runs on the Valhalla engine with the car, bike, foot, truck, and moto profiles; a single graph covers Europe and all five overseas regions, so a route in Lisbon and a route in Cayenne hit the same endpoint.

Queries for addresses outside the covered area return an empty result set (results: [] or result: null), not an error.

Filtering by country​

/v1/geocode accepts a comma-separated countrycodes filter of ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes. Codes of covered European countries (de, es, it, pt, pl…) are honoured natively by the continental instance; codes outside the covered area simply yield no results. A country code can be combined with a region alias to narrow further while querying fewer instances; see Region aliases and country filters.

Filtering by overseas region​

In OpenStreetMap the French overseas regions carry the country code fr, just like mainland France. On /v1/geocode, fr therefore means all French data: the mainland and the five overseas regions. For convenience, /v1/geocode and /v1/autocomplete also accept region aliases in countrycodes: gp (Guadeloupe), mq (Martinique), gf (French Guiana), yt (Mayotte) and re (Réunion) narrow the search to a single island, and eu narrows it to the continental index alone. Aliases are resolved server-side; results still report fr as the country code for the overseas regions.

On /v1/autocomplete the parameter works differently: the suggestion engine has no forwardable country filter, so countrycodes only selects which regional instances are queried. The five overseas aliases narrow the search to one island. fr selects every region (the whole covered area, continental Europe included) exactly like omitting the parameter, so it does not restrict results to French data. Any other code (de, es…) matches no instance and returns no suggestions; filter client-side on address.country_code instead. Which region's suggestions come first in the merged list is decided by the rules described in Result ordering; send a lat/lon bias and the closest region leads.

Degraded coverage​

Because every region runs on its own instance, an outage in one region never takes the API down. If a region is temporarily unavailable, the API keeps answering with results from the healthy regions and adds the response header X-Coverage-Degraded: <regions> listing the regions that actually failed: an honest, partial answer instead of a global 5xx error.

The header reports failures only. A region that was never queried, or one dropped because the request's time budget ran out, is not listed: on those, nothing is broken. See Degraded coverage for what to do with the header in a search box.

Need a region we do not cover yet?

Europe and the French overseas regions are the launch dataset. Other continents follow the same recipe (one extract, one instance, one entry in the region registry) and are rolled out region by region. Contact us and tell us which regions you need: demand directly drives the rollout order.

All data is processed and served from infrastructure hosted in France.

Data Freshness​

  • The geocoding dataset is imported from the official Geofabrik extracts (the European extract plus one per overseas region) and kept up to date through the Geofabrik replication feed, continuously and region by region: community edits to OpenStreetMap reach geocodeme.net as updates are applied, typically within days rather than months.
  • The routing graph and the map tiles are rebuilt periodically (monthly) from the same extracts.
  • Geocoding responses are additionally cached in Redis for fast repeat lookups; see the meta.cache_hit field in responses.

If you notice missing or outdated data, the best fix benefits everyone: contribute the correction to OpenStreetMap, and it will be picked up at the next refresh.