A Better Pelias Setup for Singapore

Pelias is a modular open-source geocoder using Elasticsearch, easily deployable using Docker and Docker-compose.

This project is configured to download/prepare/build a complete Pelias installation for Singapore, based loosely around the official Pelias Singapore project. Enhancements:

• Using a Singapore-specific (as opposed to SG-Msia-Brunei) OSM extract from BBBike
• Including road information from Singapore Land Authority's (SLA) national mapline on GovTech's datamall [TODO]
• Including geo-encoding information from SLA's OneMap API as a custom .csv dataset

In particular, we use the OneMap API to:

• Geo-encode LTA's list of MRT/LRT stations in English and Chinese
• Geo-encode the list of shopping malls from Wikipedia
• Geo-encode the list of schools provided by MOE on GovTech's datamall
• Retrieve a dump of available postal codes and geo-encoding information as in this repo

Usage

Quick-Start

Configuration

Edit the .env file according to required configuration. If the Pelias service is meant to be persistent across reboots, the DATA_DIR environment variable should be changed.

Copying Data Over

The prepared data files for importing into pelias should be copied from data/pelias into the $DATA_DIR/extra-data specified by the .env configuration - see pelias.json for details.

Setting up Pelias

Follow the instructions in the official Pelias repo for installing Pelias. For convenience, the pelias command and associated libraries have been copied into this repository. The minimum configuration required in order to run this project are installing prerequisites, install the pelias command and configure the environment.

To run a complete build, execute the following commands:

pelias compose pull
pelias elastic start
pelias elastic wait
pelias elastic create
pelias download all
pelias prepare all
pelias import all
pelias compose up

You can now make queries against your new Pelias build:

http://localhost:4000/v1/search?text=sentosa

Updating LTA and GovTech Data

scripts/update-data.R provides a cross-platform way to update the list of MRT/LRT stations from LTA and school information from MOE. Run it from the root of this project directory.

Updating the OneMap API scrape

scripts/scrape-onemap.R contains code to re-scrape the OneMap API for a geo-encoding of the LTA/GovTech/Wikipedia datasets, and to retrieve a new dump of all possible postal codes. The data/logs/ folder contains a log of attempted and successful postal codes. scripts/prepare-pelias.R should then be run to prepare the new data for importing into Pelias.