[Talk-us] Alt_names on counties

[stevea]

Like some things in computer science / database searching / software-based cartography, this feels like yet another "do our best to document, code, data-enter and find what works / doesn't work, then lather-rinse-repeat."  As long as we document (in wiki, in the map, in practice) that we have/use name, alt_name, official_name, loc_name (and all the rest), we "do our best" to capture these semantics.  The iterative process of how all of that works with renderers/routers/searchers that pay attention to all of it is, it seems by necessity, a slow-moving and a back-and-forth-many-times effort.

Dialog like this is an important part of that.  We are, after all, inventing and developing-on-the-fly a crowd-sourced planetary-wide map, and there are millions (billions, really) of us involved.  After a decade or two (or three, or four...), it gets better, but I'm content to look ahead to OSM's second, third, fourth and fifth decades as "better gets YET BETTER."  Sharpen focus, sharpen focus, sharpen focus.

SteveA

> On Dec 26, 2019, at 9:33 AM, Greg Troxel <gdt at lexort.com> wrote:
> 
> stevea <steveaOSM at softworkers.com> writes:
> 
>> Also, I find that "alt_name" works well for abbreviated county names,
>> as in California in certain contexts, the name of a county without the
>> word "county" appended unambiguously communicates a geography to
>> someone.  (As in "From this part of Amador (county), you'll have to
>> skirt the edge of El Dorado to get to Alpine").  Greg (M.) seems to
>> indicate this happens in (Pima) Arizona, as well.
> 
> I can see that this is useful, but I see that as "how should a
> renderer/router/searcher use the database", vs "we should add alt_foo
> tags for anything that  someone might search on".