[OSM-talk] Name finder and home page search working again

Lars Aronsson lars at aronsson.se
Wed Mar 26 03:37:24 GMT 2008


Sven Grüner wrote:

> That brought up another question to my mind, which isn't related 
> to the name finder in particular: Is there any agreement on how 
> to tag abreviated place names? When there's the 'Volkswagen 
> plant' people would also search for 'VW plant'. Obviously no 
> application like the name finder can be expected to know the 
> abreviations of all companies and institutions of the world. So 
> the data should hold that information itself.

People can invent all sorts of names, such as "the big apple" for 
New York City.  We can't reasonably enter all of them as tags.  

Also, tags cannot address the problem of ambiguity.  There are 
dozens of little villages in Sweden named Paris, and one town 
(Vänersborg) has the nickname of "little Paris".  Both Stockholm 
and St. Petersburg, Russia, go by the nickname of "Venice of the 
north".

If the user of a search engine enters a name, it must be the 
search engine's task to mediate between the user and the database 
of available names.  This is not the task of the tags.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se




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