[OSM-talk] bulk loading towns/cities locations

[Jason Reid]

That is the general approach we have used when we loaded the data from 
this specific dataset for Western Canada (about 2000 some names from 
what I recall). While there are a few oddities (it included a number of 
places that no longer exist (due to abandonment, or annexation), and 
missed others that have been around since the end of the 19th century, 
it was overall fairly accurate.

I'd suspect that most of the Australian towns that are missing are the 
more remote ones so overlapping shouldn't be too large an issue, 
although there are cases with suburbs may show up (in the case for 
Canada it was mostly suburbs that had existed as their own town at some 
point in the past) so it may be an idea to take a peak at more populated 
areas before uploading the full set.

-Jason Reid

Paul wrote:
> I guess 1.8k would be worst case is 1.8 km ,but on average about 900meters, which I think 
> would be mostly acceptable .
> My vote would be "yes" since some data is better than no data.
>
> May be we could tag these with a label "to-be confirmed" so later users could reposition 
> this if to far from the natural centre of the correct location.
>
> eg
> the Label could have :
>
> source=Geographical Names Board
> checked=false
>
> And then mappers could re-locate these and then remove checked or replace with checked=true
> Paul
>
>
>
> On 4/11/2007 5:47 PM, Brent Easton wrote:
>   
>> Hi Paul,
>>
>> There are thousands of towns not loaded in Australia! 
>>
>> The good news is that there is a free set of data available from the Geographical Names Board that specifies every named location in Australia and specifies a Lat and Lon.
>>
>> The bad news is that the data is only recorded to the nearest minute (from memory) which means that each name can be up to about 1.8km from it actual location, and all location with 1.8km of another end up in the same place.
>>
>> We can load this data up fairly easily. There is a script that was used to load the equivalent data from Ireland.
>>
>> The question is how useful this is, given the (in)accuracy of the data. It depends on what the Australian Community think.
>>
>> I can see some advantage to this (if the existing names in Australia where removed before the upload) to give a rough location of towns, but have always been hesitant because of the innacuracy. It also includes locations for all suburbs in cities, and these will just end up piled on top of each other .
>>
>> Regards,
>> Brent.
>>
>> *********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********
>>
>> On 4/11/2007 at 4:23 PM Paul  wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> Is there a feature to bulk load the location of  towns/villages/cities
>>> etc..? ie just the marker for its location (not the ways)
>>>
>>> I found that there maybe several towns not loaded into OSM for Australia
>>> , so would it be easier to load these placemakers into the system in Bulk?
>>>
>>> Paul
>>>
>>>
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>> ____________________________________________________________
>> Brent Easton                       
>> Analyst/Programmer                               
>> University of Western Sydney                                   
>> Email: b.easton at uws.edu.au
>>
>>
>>     
>
>
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