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

[Andy Robinson]

On 26/03/2008, 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.
>
>  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.
>

I don't see why we can't make use of "known_as=" names. Giving options
for "The Big Apple" and the like just sets OSM apart from the
competition. If communities are using these alternative names then it
would nice to support them in the long run.

Cheers

Andy

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