[OSM-talk] Place names with coordinates in Wikipedia + OSM

[Mike Collinson]

Hi Lars,

I've been working with the GNS data for Sweden so some notes from that limited regard. What you are suggesting sounds very worthwhile for both projects and I would be glad to join in, follow up on talk-se?

- If I am not mixing sources up, Geonames.org is tainted with digitisations from GoogleMaps and therefore not a safe source for OSM.

- Better would be to use the Sweden file directly from http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/namefiles.htm. This will be the base of much of Geonames.org and is legally safe to use

- I have well developed Perl scripts to read from that file so could quickly create some place per square kilometre metrics if you want.

- I would speculate that directly drawing data from OSM would be the way to proceed. OSM can then be used to edit and correct any GNS data that you choose to carefully augment it with.

- The guys on the Norwegian list have pretty much given up on GNS data though I personally would not go that far.  The problems with the GNS data are: the locations are very low resolution even at high latitudes. Depending on what feature you are dealing with and in what type of terrain, we can shift them using landsat data in JOSM or Potlatch but it is still an effort.  From the Norwegian experience, the collections seems to have a lot names which have no modern significance.  There is also a small but appreciable number of bad transcriptions.  I guess these last two are not so critical to Wikipedia as you would simply ignore anything that does not have a Wikipedia entry - that also might help OSM if we applied the same filter backwards, I already do that manually.

- Is the Geonames classification (type of place) good enough for OSM? It is based on GNS.  I've managed to pull out and QC all Swedish län and kommuns and they are already in OSM (place=county and kommun respectively).  Distinguishing between OSM city, town, village, hamlet, suburb and (what are now) individual houses (gård) is really hard as they often just classified as PPL / Populated Place. The other things that I'd guess would be useful for Wikipedia - rivers, lakes, sea features, mountains and islands - are relatively easy to map to OSM classification.


Mike


At 01:15 AM 29/10/2008, Lars Aronsson wrote:

>Hi, I'm user:LA2 and have not been very active in OSM in 2008. 
>Instead I have been more active in the Swedish language Wikipedia. 
>This might change back in 2009.
>
>The Swedish language Wikipedia has many articles about places that 
>don't specify any geographic coordinate.  Some other language 
>versions of Wikipedia have special task forces or "wikiprojects" 
>aiming to add coordinates to articles.
>
>Once coordinates are in the articles, they can be extracted to 
>create a list of places names to coordinates, useful for OSM.
>Perhaps the reverse can also be made?  Has anyone tried this?
>
>Does OSM have any metric, such as place names per square kilometer 
>or place names per 1000 inhabitants, to help me understand if 
>there are too few or enough many place names in OSM for Sweden?
>
>Place names should typically be related to population density. But 
>do we have any free population density data?
>
>If we are going to create a list of place names with coordinates, 
>we could just as well do this for Wikipedia and OSM at the same 
>time.  What is the best way?  Perhaps this should be kept and 
>maintained as a separate database, that can then be imported into 
>OSM and Wikipedia?  If so, is that database Geonames.org?  I see 
>there is a [[Geonames errata]] page on the OSM wiki, but it links 
>to a non-existing external page.
>
>Besides Geonames, are there NASA/CIA/TIGER data that provide place 
>names with coordinates for Northern Europe?  Are they accurate 
>enough to be useful, or do we need to improve them?  Is the 
>Geonames classification (type of place) good enough for OSM?
>
>
>-- 
>  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
>
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