[OSM-talk] A post box called Breuningsweiler

[David Earl]

In looking for why certain things weren't behaving as I expected in the name
finder, I came across a number of occasions (464 to be precise) where place
tags have been applied to things other than places. Most of these are
aeroway=airport; place=airport and in two cases amenity=airport.

There are several highway nodes where the name is clearly the town name not
the highway name, and these will be rendered: Cherbourg-Octeville and
Valognes for example. You might catch a node by accident in JOSM and apply a
highway tag to it, but it is odd that some ways are labelled as both highway
and place.

The remaining 50 or so are apparently borrowing nodes to apply place to
rather than creating a node for the purpose. These are all sorts of nodes,
but the effect is to imply that various amenities and other features have
names. For example, there's a post box called Breuningsweiler, a mini
roundabout called Birchington and a set of traffic signals which are graced
by the name Friern Barnet!

The awkward ones are where the name really could be shared, and are
presumably deliberate overloading rather than laziness. For example, there
are 11 occurrences of railway=station; place=town/city/village/suburb;
name=whatever, and a couple of town halls in the same vein.

Seems to me that some tags have a kind of 'category' status (like 'place'
and 'highway'), and others have 'property' status ('oneway=yes',
'name=blah'), and when two categories coincide on the same entity trouble is
like to ensue in various applications of the data.

Just thought I'd mention it.

David