[Talk-us] Alt_names on counties

[Tod Fitch]

In your case the name (Congressman Ed Pastor Freeway) is quite different than the alt_name (South Mountain Freeway). I am not sure what the signage is on the ground (I won’t be driving through there for another few months) but this is what I’d expect the alt_name to be used for.

However it is located in Maricopa County (name=“Maricopa County” with alt_name=“Maricopa”) and that use of alt_name is what I find annoying.

To be up front, I had not noticed this naming practice in Arizona and California before I’d modified my topographic map rendering to combine the name and alt_name values into a form of “name value (alt_name value)” and seeing “Maricopa County (Maricopa)” on my map is what brought it to my attention. In your case “Congressman Ed Pastor Freeway (South Mountain Freeway)” would make perfect sense from the point of view of my rendering.

If the hive opinion is that having the alt_name value be a substring of the name value is okay then so be it. But my impression was that the alt_name was for cases like the South Mountain Freeway where the two names were significantly different.

Regarding keeping the alt_name in this case to assist searching is not an issue. For example if you search for “Columbia” on https:www.openstreetmap.org to find Columbia County in Washington State you will find many other Columbia Counties around the country, only the one in Florida has alt_name=Columbia set. Nominatim will return all of them despite the lack of an alt_name tag on most of them.

Cheers!
Tod

> On Dec 25, 2019, at 10:55 PM, Greg Morgan <dr.kludge.gm at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Please don't remove the alt_name tags.  They are useful and not that much of a distraction or an error  For example, a new freeway was just renamed for a congress person that helped with many AZ transportation projects.  I added the alt_name tag so that the South Mountain Freeway can still be found in a search.  The new name is months old while the old alt_name has been used for decade.  Not everyone calls Pima County by its full name.  That's why I think that the mapper added the alt_name so that searches would be successful.
> 
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/78850121 <https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/78850121>
> 
> On Wed, Dec 25, 2019 at 6:26 PM Tod Fitch <tod at fitchfamily.org <mailto:tod at fitchfamily.org>> wrote:
> I’ve noticed that a number of counties in California and Arizona have what seems to be unneeded alt_name tags in their boundary relations. For example Pima County, Arizona has name=“Pima County” and alt_name=“Pima”. Same for Pinal County in Arizona and Riverside, Orange, Kern and Ventura counties in California. But this does not seem universal as the few counties I looked at in Washington state have only a name=* tag (e.g. name=“Columbia County”).
> 
> I don’t see a wiki page for the standard for this in the United States. Is there one I’ve missed?
> 
> Assuming there is not standard for this, should there be? And what should it be? (My preference is to remove an alt_name that is simply the name without “County”.)
> 
> For what it is worth, it looks like the alt_names for counties in Arizona and California were added in 2014 by the user “revent” who is still actively mapping borders around the world.
> 
> Thanks!
> Tod
> 
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