Reverse geocoding is hard

My wife and I run OpenBenches - a crowd-sourced database of nearly 40,000 memorial benches. Every bench is geo-tagged with a latitude and longitude. But how do you go from a string of digits to something human readable? How do I turn -33.755780,150.603769 into "42 Wallaby Way, Sydney, Australia"? Luckily, that's a (somewhat) solved problem. Services like OpenCage, StadiaMaps, OpenStreetMap, and Geocode.Earth all provide APIs which transform co-ordinates into addresses. Done! Let's go home. Except… Not everywhere has an address. Some benches are in parks. They typically don't have a street number, but might have an interesting feature nearby to help with location. For example a statue or prominent landmark. And… Not every address is relevant. Some benches are on streets. But we probably don't want to imply that the bench is inside or belongs to a specific nearby house. Let's step back a bit. Why do we want to display a human-readable address? We have two use-cases. "As a visitor ... Read full article.