[Talk-us] Bay Area trailer parks: "hamlet" ? Also neighborhoods & cities

Minh Nguyen mxn at 1ec5.org
Fri Dec 5 20:02:24 GMT 2008


Beej Jorgensen wrote:
> Michal Migurski wrote:
>   
>> There are a large number of mobile home / trailer parks mapped in San  
>> Jose, Santa Clara, and other parts of the South Bay. They're tagged  
>> place=hamlet, and I'm wondering if there's a better way to identify  
>> them? Beej71, if you're on this list I think a lot of these came from  
>> you.
>>     
>
> I painstakingly put all of those in by hand!  Don't remove them! ;)
>
> I'm kidding--it was all part of a mass import I did a while back.
> Unfortunately I had no way to differentiate a trailer park from anything
> else since none of the data had a "type" beyond "Populated Place".
> There probably is a better way to tag them, but I know of no source of
> data with which to automate it.
>
>
> Here's some background on the import, which could be of use if someone
> gets a list of which place names are trailer parks:
>
> I munged the GNIS place name (and location) data with Census population
> data.  The weirdest stuff, like trailer parks and junctions, as well as
> historic towns, are all in the GNIS data.  It's some 160,000 places or
> something.
>
> Now, the Census database I got my hands only has about 80,000 entries
> (the 80,000 most populated places), with the lowest populations being
> under 100.
>
> If there was a population for a place name, here are the rules:
>
>                 if pop < 100:
>                     placetype = "hamlet"
>                 elif pop < 10000:
>                     placetype = "village"
>                 elif pop < 100000:
>                     placetype = "town"
>                 else:
>                     placetype = "city"
>
> (I made up the 100 based on the description in Features of "just a few
> houses".  The other numbers are straight from Features.)
>
> Else if there was no population data for a place name, it was likely too
> small to be listed, so I made it a "hamlet".  The data still says it's a
> "populated place", after all.
>
> To identify these nodes in OSM:
>
> Every node from the import was tagged with:
>
> import_uuid=bb7269ee-502a-5391-8056-e3ce0e66489c
>
> If (and only if) there was a census population for the place, it will be
> additionally tagged with:
>
> census:population=popxxx;dateyyy
>
> Sorry for the late reply,
> -Beej
>   
Interestingly, there's several "undefined" locations [1], some of which 
are located in the United States. These seem to be real places: the 
other day, I noticed an undefined POI where Osborne, Ohio would've been.

[1] http://gazetteer.openstreetmap.org/namefinder/?find=undefined

-- 
Minh Nguyen <mxn at zoomtown.com>
AIM: trycom2000; Jabber: mxn at 1ec5.org; Blog: http://notes.1ec5.org/





More information about the Talk-us mailing list