[OSM-talk] [OSM-talk-ie] All places in Ireland - GNS Data now accessible!

[Christian van den Bosch]

Dermot McNally wrote:
 > Those of you at the meeting in Balbriggan will recall our conversation
 > about the GNS data and my eagerness to turn it into usable OSM data.
 > It took me a while longer, but some usable work is now there to be
 > seen.

Nice work!

> name:ga, name:en: For places where English and Irish names were
> available, both are entered. Whichever named seemed from the
> data-source to be definitive (usually the English one, but possibly
> different in the Gaeltacht) was used for the 'name' attribute, which
> is likely to be necessary to ensure that the renderers will Do The
> Right Thing.

Anything's got to be better than the GNS approach of "include the same 
POI two or possibly three times in different languages apparently at 
random", though I guess this relates to the quality of the source 
material used by the NGA. It would be interesting to know the copyright 
status of this source material.

 > is_in: I've built a county lookup table of the codes used in the ADM1
 > field. Based on this, I've set is_in to "County <county name>" for
 > each POI where this was possible. (some have ADM1 set to 00, and I
 > haven't worked out whether this corresponds to anything other than
 > 'unknown').

Most of these are in the 'sparse' area across the midlands, but there's 
a scattering of them in just about every county. I'm not sure how best 
to handle the points that just plain have the wrong county set.

 > place_county: This doesn't seem to be in standard use, but it struck
 > me as worthwhile to set a field to the county name (without the prefix
 > 'County '). Maybe we'll find a use for it...

Sounds good to me. Though is_in and place_county together sound a bit 
redundant...?

 > population: Only present for a handful of locations, but set where 
available.

Note the age of the data though - I'd be inclined to import the NGA date 
field along with the rest.

 > I'd be very interested in some comments on this. It would be really
 > easy to add these to the database, but we should have a good look now
 > just to make sure we like what's going in. Since the source is set, it
 > would be easy to back the stuff out as well, but that's a bit rough on
 > anyone who has already adopted some of the points, enhanced and maybe
 > respotted them :-)

Probably better to do it earlier rather than later before there's a lot 
of other data in place already? Can we get a count of Irish POIs 
currently in OSM? (What _is_ a POI in OSM exactly? A node that doesn't 
belong to any segments or ways? Does it need to have specific tags set?)

Barry Hunter wrote:
 > Just a note about the data in GNS specific to Ireland. It seems that
 > there is a patch of data not full complete, see:
 >
 > http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/268.page

Yup, this sounds like the same problem noted above (particularly with 
the ADM1 value set to 0). Let's keep our fingers crossed for updates 
from the NGA.

Christian / cjb

http://www.cjb.ie/