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

[80n]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 3:37 AM, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:

> 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.
>

Why not?  It seems reasonable to me to allow people to add common usage
names in addition to formal names.  Isn't it, in fact, one of OSM's unique
features that we can do this?



>
> 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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