nominatimlite

The goal of nominatimlite is to provide a lightweight interface for geocoding addresses with the Nominatim API. It also allows you to return results as sf objects using the sf package.

The full site with examples and vignettes is available at https://dieghernan.github.io/nominatimlite/

What is Nominatim?

Nominatim is a tool for searching OpenStreetMap data by name and address (geocoding) and generating synthetic addresses for OSM points (reverse geocoding).

Why nominatimlite?

nominatimlite accesses the Nominatim API without depending on curl. In some situations, curl may not be available or accessible, so nominatimlite uses base R functions instead.

Recommended packages

Other packages are more complete and mature than nominatimlite and provide similar features:

• tidygeocoder (Cambon et al. 2021): Provides an interface to geocoding services such as Nominatim, Google, TomTom and Mapbox.
• osmdata (Padgham et al. 2017): Downloads spatial data from OpenStreetMap with the Overpass API.
• arcgeocoder (Hernangómez 2024): Provides a lightweight interface for geocoding with the ArcGIS REST API service.

Installation

install.packages("nominatimlite")

pak::pak("dieghernan/nominatimlite")

# Install nominatimlite in R:
install.packages(
  "nominatimlite",
  repos = c(
    "https://dieghernan.r-universe.dev",
    "https://cloud.r-project.org"
  )
)

Usage

sf objects

With nominatimlite you can return sf objects:

library(nominatimlite)

# Search for Pizza Hut locations in California.

CA <- geo_lite_sf("California", points_only = FALSE)

pizzahut <- geo_lite_sf(
  "Pizza Hut, California",
  limit = 50,
  custom_query = list(countrycodes = "us")
)

library(ggplot2)

ggplot(CA) +
  geom_sf() +
  geom_sf(data = pizzahut, col = "red")

You can also return polygon and line objects when the Nominatim API provides them, using the option points_only = FALSE:

# A building, returned as a polygon.
sol_poly <- geo_lite_sf("Statue of Liberty, NY, USA", points_only = FALSE)

ggplot(sol_poly) +
  geom_sf()

# Default, returned as a point.
dayton <- geo_lite_sf("Dayton, OH")
# A US state, returned as a polygon.
ohio_state <- geo_lite_sf("Ohio, USA", points_only = FALSE)
# A river, returned as a line.
ohio_river <- geo_lite_sf("Ohio river", points_only = FALSE)

ggplot() +
  geom_sf(data = ohio_state) +
  geom_sf(data = dayton, color = "red", pch = 4) +
  geom_sf(data = ohio_river, color = "blue")

Geocoding and reverse geocoding

Note: examples are adapted from the tidygeocoder package.

In this first example, we geocode a few addresses with geo_lite():

library(tibble)

# Create a data frame with addresses.
some_addresses <- tribble(
  ~name, ~addr,
  "White House", "1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC",
  "Transamerica Pyramid", "600 Montgomery St, San Francisco, CA 94111",
  "Willis Tower", "233 S Wacker Dr, Chicago, IL 60606"
)

# Geocode the addresses.
lat_longs <- geo_lite(
  some_addresses$addr,
  lat = "latitude",
  long = "longitude",
  progressbar = FALSE
)

This example returns only latitude, longitude and address columns from the Nominatim API. Use full_results = TRUE to return all available data from the Nominatim API.

Table 1: Example: geocoding addresses.

To perform reverse geocoding, use reverse_geo_lite() to obtain addresses from geographic coordinates. The arguments are similar to geo_lite(), but now we provide coordinate values with the lat and long arguments. The dataset used here is from the geocoding query above. The single-line address is returned in a column named with the address argument.

reverse <- reverse_geo_lite(
  lat = lat_longs$latitude,
  long = lat_longs$longitude,
  address = "address_found",
  progressbar = FALSE
)

Table 2: Example: reverse geocoding addresses.

For more advanced users, see the Nominatim documentation for the available parameters.

Citation

Hernangómez D (2026). nominatimlite: Interface to the Nominatim API. doi:10.32614/CRAN.package.nominatimlite. https://dieghernan.github.io/nominatimlite/.

A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is

@Manual{R-nominatimlite,
  title = {{nominatimlite}: Interface to the {Nominatim} {API}},
  doi = {10.32614/CRAN.package.nominatimlite},
  author = {Diego Hernangómez},
  year = {2026},
  version = {0.6.0},
  url = {https://dieghernan.github.io/nominatimlite/},
  abstract = {Lightweight interface to the OpenStreetMap Nominatim API <https://nominatim.org/release-docs/latest/>. Extract coordinates from addresses, retrieve addresses from coordinates, look up amenities and addresses, and return results as tibble or sf objects.},
}

References