[OSM-talk] Hierarchy of places & search results

[Tom Chance]

Sorry, neglected to send this to the list...

On Fri, 28 Nov 2008 11:14:54 +0000, David Earl <david at frankieandshadow.com>
wrote:
> The discussion of finding Paris Ontario equated to Paris France just now 
> reminds me to raise again the granularity of our place hierarchy. 
> Notwithstanding value judgements people make about what is a "town", not 
> just based on population, I still think we need some more levels in the
> city - town - village - hamlet hierarchy.

Two tagging thoughts and three search ideas...

Tags 1 - Yes, let's have more granularity in the
city/town/village/suburb/hamlet schema, and let someone run through their
regions updating places

Tags 2 - Use administrative importance as well, i.e. we properly mark when
places are capitals of countries / regions / local government / etc. so
they get boosted up the search ranks. Bedford (UK) comes up 10th below a
load of insignificant looking US towns.


Search 1 - Guess the searcher's country by IP and prioritise those results,
if I'm in the UK I'm probably going to only want UK results unless I
specify "Bedford, USA"

Search 2 - Show country flags by results, maybe even group results by
city/town/etc. and then within those categories by country. When searching
for Bedford I had to look at the coordinates because I didn't realised
"Town Bedford, about 5km north of Wixams" was the right one.

Search 3 - Show pinpoints for the results on the map, so at least you can
quickly discard all those results from the wrong side of the globe.

Kind regards,
Tom