Initial development roadmap

development_roadmap.md

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+# Development Roadmap
+
+Pelias has a long list of features and improvements we wish to make. This is
+where we keep track of them!
+
+As an open-source project, we don't usually have a timeline or estimate for
+when items on our roadmap will be completed, but this document does serve as a
+roughly priority order of major changes we hope to make.
+
+## Solve the "postal cities" challenge
+
+Pelias uses strict geometric boundary decisions to determine what city (and
+other administrative areas) a record belongs to. For various reasons, the real
+world is not often so clear cut.
+
+Often, the city people expect to see for a given place has more to do with the
+nuonces of local postal service delivery than strict borders.
+
+https://github.com/pelias/pelias/issues/396
+
+## Improved Autocomplete
+
+Pelias has recently made many improvements to the search endpoint (which
+supports only completed inputs), but has not brought all of them to the
+autocomplete endpoint. Some features to implement:
+
+- Drop the requirement of commas to separate address components
+- Better multi-language search support
+- Improved handling of synonyms/abbreviations
+
+## Elasticsearch 5 Support
+
+Pelias is currently only compatible and well tested on Elasticsearch 2. While
+the code changes required to support Elasticsearch 5 are minimal, testing and
+validating Elasticsearch 5 as the default version is not complete and will
+require significant work including testing full planet builds.
+
+https://github.com/pelias/pelias/issues/461
+
+## Improved importer speed
+
+A full planet Pelias build currently generally takes 2-3 days. Many parts of
+this import process can be sped up, and many more parts can be made more easily
+parallelized.
+
+In the near future, our target is for a full planet build to take less than 24
+hours using under $100 of AWS EC2 instances.
+
+## Expanded input language support
+
+Overall, Pelias has a solid founation of language and internationalization
+support. The Pelias data schema allows for records to have multiple name
+values. These might include names in different langages, alternate names,
+colloquial names, or common abbreviations (for example airport codes).
+
+However, not all data importers currently add multiple names, even when they
+are available in the source data. Futhermore, not all our queries use these
+alternate names effectively.
+
+Pelias currently supports querying for administrative areas in many languges on
+the `/v1/search` endpoint.
+
+For autocomplete, the queries are not currently able to utilize multiple
+administrative area names.
+
+Additionally, due to limitations in the polylines data format, no streets
+imported from OSM include alternate names, even if they are available in OSM.
+
+## Fuzzy matching/typo correction for autocomplete
+
+The Pelias autocomplete endpoint currently supports extremely limited typo
+correction. However, this support is really a result of implementation details,
+and not a result of a concerted effort.
+
+By adding such a feature in a deliberate way we can greatly increase the
+usability of the autocomplete endpoint.
+
+## Support for returning polygon data
+
+Pelias often returns records such as cities, states, countries, etc which have
+polygons associated with them representing their boundaries. Pelias uses these
+polygons for point-in-polygon lookups when necessary, but cannot currnely send
+these polygons in the response JSON so that users can use that geometry data.
+
+https://github.com/pelias/whosonfirst/issues/19