[Talk-ca] Wikidata in OpenStreetMap

Stewart C. Russell scruss at gmail.com
Sat Nov 12 20:31:53 UTC 2016


Hi James,

> This should explain more of what wikidata is capable of doing via 1 tag:
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/LogicalViolinist/diary/39872

Yes, I think the wikidata tag is a good idea. It would be nice of there
were an easier query language than Sparql to pull out towns/cities that
Wikidata already knows about … but that might constitute an import.

> is_in:country: Canada

Hey, a little bit Anglocentric there. Why not also
is_in:country:lv=Kanāda, is_in:country:ml=കാനഡ, is_in:country:ne=क्यानाडा, …?

> state_code,country_code, iso_3166_2 are ISO notations that can be used
> and have a standard that is international and can be parsed easily by
> computers.

And also complete duplication of existing boundary information. The
is_in:iso_3166_2 seems to be very rarely used (~200 in all of N.
America) and has no documentation. So it's best not used, or should be
discussed and documented first.

The wikidata tag also contains a geographic membership relationship, so
it's not like we need is_in:* to help them.

> What I don't like in "is_in" tag is as you said it's a bunch of garbage

No, I said that the is_in *family* of tags is deprecated. But we're
fairly heavy users of it in Canada (something like 10% of the world's
is_in:* tags are in Ontario + Quebec:
https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/?key=is_in#overview), likely due
to the age of our imports.

cheers,
 Stewart




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