How can I change Nominatim's reverse geocoding behaviour?

Question

I'm conducting some tests against nominatim.openstreetmap.org, looking at reverse geocoding. Based upon my observations I have two questions:

1) Given that I'm looking at data generated from a vehicle, this request and response are unexpected:

http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/reverse?lat=52.50676&lon=-1.99523&addressdetails=1&format=xml&zoom=18

<reversegeocode timestamp="Mon, 02 Dec 13 14:47:07 +0000" attribution="Data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0. http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright" querystring="lat=52.50676&lon=-1.99523&addressdetails=1&format=xml&zoom=18">
<result place_id="9146383198" osm_type="way" osm_id="60694393" ref="CLOSED for 60 weeks from Sep 2013" lat="52.506753" lon="-1.9943365">
CLOSED for 60 weeks from Sep 2013, Londonderry, Warley, Sandwell, West Midlands, England, B70 6AS, United Kingdom
</result>
<addressparts>
<footway>CLOSED for 60 weeks from Sep 2013</footway>
<neighbourhood>Londonderry</neighbourhood>
<suburb>Warley</suburb>
<city>Sandwell</city>
<county>West Midlands</county>
<state_district>West Midlands</state_district>
<state>England</state>
<postcode>B70 6AS</postcode>
<country>United Kingdom</country>
<country_code>gb</country_code>
</addressparts>
</reversegeocode>

It seems that I need Nominatim to ignore ways with highway=footway - can I achieve this?

2) Can I ask for a reverse geocoded response to include other tag values? I have been able to find the maxspeed tag value by requesting an api lookup following the reverse geocode request, for example, http://api.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/way/144176050. This is ok but it would be far better if I could obtain the information from a single reverse geocode call as it seems reasonable to expect to be able to obtain other tag values from Nominatim. Is this possible? I note the Extra Tags shown from the Nominatim data here: http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/details.php?place_id=9146205970

If these things are not possible then I wonder if I could better achieve it I had my own Nominatim instance? I'm prepared to get into the Nominatim coding and make changes if necessary (but obviously need to consider the impact of the change and ensure it avoids any behavioural change for other contributors).

Thanks for any advice.

Note I also asked this question here: https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/28695/how-can-i-change-nominatims-reverse-geocoding-behaviour

Answer 1

You can add the extratags parameter. According to the Nominatim Wiki:

extratags=1

Include additional information in the result if available, e.g. wikipedia link, opening hours.

Your new request would be:

http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/reverse?lat=52.50676&lon=-1.99523&addressdetails=1&format=xml&zoom=18&extratags=1

Hope it's no too late :)

Answer 2

Regarding the problem 2:

The solution is to set format parameter to jsonv2. Besides, to focus on roads only set zoom to 16.

This way a response should contain "highway" by category key and osm highway tag value by type key.

Example request: https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/reverse?format=jsonv2&lat=49.83852&lon=24.00779&zoom=16