[Talk-us-sfbay] Silicon Valley

[Minh Nguyen]

On 2018-01-27 05:42, Marc Tobias wrote:
> Hi,
>
> A user of the Nominatim geocoder noted that there's no place
> called 'Silicon Valley' in OpenStreetMap.
>
> In old changesets I found it existed at some point
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/1950908 with center
> point University Avenue, Palo Alto.
>
> Arguably the center could also be the
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Garage
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1710414037
> but I found it more surprising it doesn't exist at all.
>
> San Francisco Bay Area, with alt_name=Bay Area exists as a
> region
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2157162589
>
> Can I go ahead and create a similar node for Silicon
> Valley? Just want to make sure there weren't past
> discussions or even edit wars I missed.
>
> thx
>
> marc tobias 
A trail in Uganda shows up first in a search for "Silicon Valley". [1] 
:-D I'm unaware of prior discussion about a Silicon Valley region POI, 
but I also wasn't paying much attention to this area until a few years back.

Changeset 1950908 shows up empty for me, even in XML format. The user is 
still contributing to OSM, so they must've failed to accept the ODbL 
before the redaction process began and later accepted it only after the 
license change. [2] How did you determine that this changeset contained 
a region POI for Silicon Valley?

place=region is a poorly defined tag that nevertheless is in wide use. 
I’m not sure to what extent each of these tools [3] use the tag, but 
keep an eye out for renderers that display it too prominently (akin to a 
province in another country) or geocoders that include it in addresses. 
Other than that, there’s the issue of where to place the POI. The HP 
Garage is one option; another along the same lines would be the Shockley 
site. [4]

In short, it's worth a try. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, I also 
suggest creating a relation for it so that you can add San José to it 
with the role admin_centre.

[1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/402952054 
https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/details.php?place_id=157648116
[2] 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Database_License/Changes_in_the_API#Changeset_information_call_.2Fapi.2F0.6.2Fchangeset.2F.7Bid.7D
[3] https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/?key=place&value=region#projects
[4] https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/509913602

-- 
Minh Nguyen <minh tại nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us>