[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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