[Talk-us] New I.D Feature

Minh Nguyen minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us
Fri Nov 7 07:18:25 UTC 2014


On 2014-11-06 20:17, Elliott Plack wrote:
> Thinking more on this, and using my experience in the foursquare
> superuser editing community, trying to have a single "state" type entity
> is really quite hard to scale globally. Political boundaries and
> administrative levels vary all over the world, and trying to establish a
> single name for a smaller political unit than the country is really
> challenging. State? Province? Municipality? There are many names for
> what a US State is (if you can really compare it out), and so to use
> addr:state does seem fairly USA focused.

iD supports country-specific address formats. The "State" field only 
appears for features in the U.S., while Canadian address get a 
"Province" field. Vietnamese addresses get separate fields for 
subdistrict, district, city, and province, befitting the customary 
address format there.

> Before the state showed up in iD, I had assumed someone could just
> easily derive the US state from the postal code.

That would be the case if everyone entered ZIP codes. However, I got 
this field added [1] because its absence was confusing inexperienced 
mappers, leading to inconsistent or erroneous data entry. For example, 
people were setting addr:city to "Youngstown, Ohio" or "Dublin, OH" 
[2][3], or setting addr:postcode to "OH 45202", "OH", or "Ohio" 
[4][5][6]. This happened primarily in iD but also to a lesser extent in 
Potlatch, which also lacks a "State" field in simple mode.

[1] https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/pull/2402
[2] http://osm.org/node/2647332019/history
[3] http://osm.org/node/2152729301/history
[4] http://osm.org/node/2573293336/history
[5] http://osm.org/node/392309592/history
[6] http://osm.org/node/357466455/history

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us




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