[Talk-ko] New Road sign boards in Daejeon and surroundings

[Andrew Errington]

On Sun, 08 Aug 2010 16:44:08 Familie Fornoff wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> recently our old house number sign was removed and replaced with a new one.
> Means we got now the third address:

Hi Dieter (and everyone),

I have been trying to capture the new addresses too.  I think it's not 
possible to capture the old ones!  Robert said in an earlier email that the 
government is trying to promote the new, consistent naming/numbering, and 
from my trips around Korea it is *everywhere*.

What I have been doing is this:

For a street, I set the name to the Korean name in Hangul, followed by the 
English name from the sign in brackets.  Next I add name:en= to be the 
English name and name:ko= to be the Hangul.  I usually don't put name:ko_rm=, 
but I probably should.

I make one exception to reading the English from the sign.  I do not add the 
Romanised number sound if it is on the sign.
For example, Gimcheon 1(il)-gil I will record as name:en=Gimcheon 1-gil

The reason I do this is because the number Romanisation is inconsistent across 
Korea.  In my town there are none.  In Daegu and Seoul there are some.  I 
think we should not include them, even if they are on the sign.

For an address point (node or area) I add only addr:housenumber and 
addr:street.  The number is the number from the address sign on the house or 
business (sometimes includes a dash '-').  The street is the street name in 
Hangul.  I don't think we can add the English name to the address node or 
area because addr:street=Hangul (English) is difficult to search, and we 
can't (or shouldn't) have addr:street:en=  Furthermore, we should be getting 
software to do the tedious work of duplicating the English name by looking up 
the names of the nearby streets.  This would also eliminate introducing 
typos.  Actually, I'd like to do this with name=* because we should be able 
to programmatically make name=name:ko+' ('+name:en+')'

In summary:
Streets:
name=Hangul_street_name (English_street_name)
name:en=English_street_name
name:ko=Hangul_street_name
name:ko_rm=Romanised Hangul_street_name

Address points (nodes or areas)
addr:housenumber=number from sign
addr:street=Hangul_street_name

If people agree with this way of working I could put this on the wiki, with 
photos I have taken[1] of address points from around Korea.

Incidentally, my local post office was giving away beautiful detailed maps of 
the area, with all of the (new) street names listed.  It's too bad they won't 
give away the data...

Best wishes,

Andrew

[1] I take pictures of mountains, trees, wild animals and beautiful sunsets 
too.  Really.