[Talk-us] Alt_names on counties

[Tod Fitch]

Based on this discussion and my own checking to see what search engines are doing with the data, I think it would be okay to move the alt_name tag value to be a short_name value for the counties in California and Arizona where the current alt_name tag is the same string as the name but without a “ County” suffix. For example:

alt_name=“Los Angeles”
name=“Los Angeles County”

Changed to

name=“Los Angeles County”
short_name=“Los Angeles”

From my side this is now just a desire to be logical and consistent (not always a trait seen in OSM tagging). My initial annoyance has been dealt with on my topo map rendering by creating a Postgresql function that, among other things, will ignore alt_name values if they fit the above criteria. As noted by Joseph Eisenberg, the alt_name/short_name value could probably be dropped in these cases but I suspect that will get more push back than changing the tag.

— Tod

> On Dec 27, 2019, at 7:21 PM, Joseph Eisenberg <joseph.eisenberg at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> It's not necessary to add an alternative like "Josephine" if the name=
> is already "Josephine County" because geocoding and search application
> already know to search for part of a name.
> 
> For example this search already finds the "Josephine County"
> administrative boundary as the first result:
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=Josephine - and there is no
> short alt_name or short_name.
> 
> So I think there is no reason to have this information duplicated if
> we are just worried about search.
> 
> -Joseph Eisenberg
> 
> On 12/27/19, stevea <steveaOSM at softworkers.com> wrote:
>> I truly love the level of detail we get "coming out of the woodwork" so that
>> we may have excellent real-life examples to share with one another (and +1
>> to one another, too!)
>> 
>> To be brief about it (rare for me, I endeavor to get better):  good
>> examples, discussion / dialog and sharing our real-world experiences and
>> knowledge is only going to help things.  If somebody reading now has a
>> more-concrete understanding of differences between old-, alt-, official-,
>> and so on, hooray.  If such sharper focus finds its way into a
>> more-enlightened sentence or paragraph in a wiki, great.
>> 
>> Chip, chip, chipping away at it (are all of us),
>> SteveA
>> 
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>> 
> 
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