[Openstreetmap] GEOnet Names Server

[Richard Fairhurst]

On 2 Sep 2005, at 19:49, Jon Stockill wrote:

> I noticed this appear on the "to look at" page.
>
> It'll give you a huge amount of information very quickly, but isn't 
> without errors. There are spelling mistakes, and examples of someone 
> doing far too much historical research (Gildersome near Leeds for 
> example is also listed as "Home of the Gilders").
>
> Another problem is that the data on the rankings of "populated places" 
> appears to be missing for the uk, making the selection of place names 
> to display a bit of a problem (you can end up with small village names 
> displayed, and large city names missed because there's no room if you 
> try to handle the layout automatically).
>
> Having said all that, it's a lot of data, it appears to be available 
> under sane terms, and weeding out the small inaccuracies will likely 
> require far less work than building such a database from scratch.

I've used the GEOnet data for the UK quite a lot. It's the underlying 
gazetteer for the search function at Waterscape.com, for example. A few 
experiences:

1. It's no good as a source for mapping at any decent scale, because 
the point resolution is so low - 0.0166667 of a degree.

2. There are way too many 'variant' (read: wrong) spellings of 
placenames. For example, there's a Bangon and a Bangor at the same 
lat/long.

3. As you say, there's no ranking of place size.

None of these are serious problems for a search function, as long as 
the returned map is fairly large-scale (1:50,000's about right). But we 
then tried to use it as the source data for placenames in our dynamic 
PDF mapping (www.waterscape.com/boating/guides). The results were 
pretty gruesome.

(YMMV outside the UK - I've no experience of other country data, I'm 
afraid.)

Instead, we found another source of placenames... our old friend the 
New Popular Edition (out-of-copyright 1940s OS maps). I manually traced 
a bunch of placenames from around the waterway system using 
Illustrator, then used a Perl script to parse the resulting files into 
grid references.

For Openstreetmap UK, I'd suggest a different, but related, source: an 
Ordnance Survey paper gazetteer from about the same time. This has 
pretty complete coverage of placenames at 100m accuracy (and even 
Milton Keynes existed then... albeit a bit smaller than it is now!). 
The ranking issue still remains, but that can be solved manually.

I do own a copy of the gazetteer and would be happy to scan it 
(slowly). Unfortunately, all the OCR software I've tried for OS X 
(whether Mac-specific or generic Unix) is pretty feeble. If I scan it, 
are there any volunteers out there to OCR the resulting files?

Richard