[Tagging] named spots in settlements (toponyms)

Greg Troxel gdt at lexort.com
Tue Mar 28 23:39:58 UTC 2017


Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com> writes:

> This question is about toponyms. Usually these are tagged within the
> place-tags (some might be found in "natural" etc.). Someone wants to map
> named spots in the city, although there are no signs, these names are
> commonly known in the town (one name derives for example from a former shop
> at this spot, another name from a student's fraternity nearby). These are
> points, not areas (in reality), and they do not refer to settlement parts,
> so the tagging that is currently applied (place=neighbourhood) doesn't seem
> right.

> One alternative could be place=locality. The wiki writes that locality is
> about "unpopulated places", and I am not sure how to interpret this. Is
> this to exclude settlements and their parts (i.e. the object with this tag
> shall not represent something with population), or is it about the location
> (outside vs. inside of a settlement)?
>
> Shall we make the wiki for place=locality clearer, or should we invent a
> new place value for named spots inside populated areas?

I would be fine for changing place=locality to mean:

  a name for a particular location, generally known to the inhabitants
  of surrounding areas, and whose naming significant is other than as a
  name for a population center, such that one of the settlement
  hierarchy terms is not appropriate

more or less.

Here's a place=locality.  A few people live nearby, but that's not
relevant to how people think of the place.  It's an intersection on a
major road, and the gas station (petrol filling station :-) there has
been there since before you were born, and it's "Tracey's".  So pretty
much everyone, including radio station traffic reports, calls it
Tracey's Corner.  If the gas station were to close, people would say
"turn where Tracey's used to be" for at least 20 years.  I have tagged
it as place=locality.

  https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2448006677

Another example is

  https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2448006676

again, people live near there, but that's not the point.
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