[OSM-talk] Namefinder translations
David Earl
david at frankieandshadow.com
Mon Nov 24 18:12:35 GMT 2008
I need your help please...
(Thank you to those of you who have started already before I'd even
finished preparing the page!)
While the name finder search currently does quite a good job of handling
nuances of names in different languages, it can't currently find
categories of things in anything other than English (British English at
that). The recent mention of trying to search for "train stations near
New York" for example, doesn't work. Nor does "gares pres [de] Paris"
(or even "railway stations near Cambridge" as I only currently do one
category term, which in this case is just "stations").
One of the things I want to do in a revamp of the name finder ahead of
doing a complete regeneration of the index over Christmas is to offer
alternative category terms in multiple languages, so that "gares pres
Paris" and the like does work.
I have started a page here:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Name_finder:Translations
to collect translations. Please help by adding your own languages and
variations to it. Anything added by December 24 that is sensible and
feasible will go in - anything later I will add with the next reload in
the middle of 2009).
I haven't listed every feature (it is hard to imaging someone looking
for "covered reservoirs near Cambridge" and "feux pres de Nancy", for
example, though if you feel like adding equivalences for categories not
listed, please do. But remember that while this is loosely based on map
features, it is about human searchability: hence several tag
combinations might be found with one search term (e.g. supermarket for
shop=supermarket and amenity=supermarket), and vice-versa (mosque from
religion=islam or moslem or muslim).
I wonder whether the same list might serve as a possible API equivalence
table in the future, where one can set the API to work in your own
language and it translates to and from the canonical (c/f "Barangays"
discussion earlier). But at present there are things I don't do:
highways for example are only searched by name not category (and I
propose to leave it that way because of the somewhat specialized
vocabulary and somewhat arbitrary categorization; a search for just
"streets near ..." is also not terribly helpful in its own right because
of the number of hits, but will be covered separately by a forthcoming
gazetteer facility).
I'm also reconsidering adding "in" as well as "near" (and comma) as the
separator. The problem is that there are a couple of place names in
England which have "In" in their names - Henley-In-Arden for example. (A
second problem is that since it works only by proximity, "in" will yeild
things that are wildly not "in" somewhere, but that's outweighed by what
people naturally type, I think).
However, I think I may use some subtle capitalization to deal with these
minor cases. But extending the separator to multiple languages may cause
some clashes, and many I wouldn't be aware of. For example, are there
any French (or any language) names of the form "X pres de Y"?
David
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