[OSM-talk] Improving on the NGA placenames data

[Phil Endecott]

Dear Experts,

For a while I've been hacking together a digital picture frame 
application that shows my geo-located photos on a world map.  At the 
moment I'm using the NASA "blue marble" satellite imagery for the 
basemap, which works well (and looks nice) at the sort of scale that 
I'm interested in.

I've just been experimenting with superimposing the NGA place names 
data (http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/namefiles.htm).  As is noted 
on the OSM wiki, this data is not perfect but it's a lot better than 
nothing.  In particular, for many countries it has no ranking of place 
importance, and for things like rivers and mountains it has no ranking 
at all.  (I haven't yet worked out whether there is ranking for 
administrative areas but I don't think there is.)  Also, the town/city 
rankings that it does have don't seem to be very comparable from one 
country to another.

So I was wondering whether anyone here knows how I could improve on 
this, i.e.

- Is there an "improved" version somewhere with more ranking 
information in it?
- Is there other data that I could cross-reference it with to extract 
ranking?  (For example, lists of national capitals, regional capitals, 
etc. or cities/regions by population or area.  Or rivers by length or 
mountains by height etc.)
- Is there some sort of algorithm that I could use to guestimate 
rankings?  (I have considered counting the number of google hits for 
each one!)
- Is there equivalent data in the OSM database, with rankings of some 
sort, that I could extract a dump of?

I'm sure there's someone out there who has thought about these problems 
before.  Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Phil.


p.s. Every time I visit openstreetmap.org I'm more and more impressed 
by the quality and scale of what's been achieved.  I sometimes think I 
should help, but everywhere I go already seems to have been 
immaculately surveyed.  Congratulations to everyone involved.