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

[David Earl]

On 27/03/2008 10:56, Sebastian Spaeth wrote:
> I wonder whether some context can be drawn in from whether there is a 
> administrative city boundary or residential landuse area surrounding a 
> street. But this would of course increase the parsing complexity a lot, 
> I guess.

It's a whole different algorithm. The name finder works purely on 
proximity at the moment (except for is_in - see previous mail).

But I agree this would be very desirable. A fundamental problem though 
is that the data isn't there very widely in the maps to support this at 
present.

I have in mind a piece of work I'm loosely calling "finding the urban 
envelope" which would analyse areas based on highway=residential and 
abutters, where present, and other relevant clues, to heuristically 
determine contiguous settlements. This would give us the kind of linkage 
we'd need to do what you're suggesting. It would also I think give us:

- a tool to semi-automatically base drawing of the polygons for 
landuse=residential (or better, a new landuse=urban) for the background 
that some people are putting in manually now (but are actually not the 
norm AFAICS);

- a way of estimating settlement size/population which could be used to 
better label maps

- possibly a way of weighting journey times in route planners

David