[OSM-talk] What Streets are in what Places

[Florian Lohoff]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 07:43:20AM +0000, Peter Childs wrote:
> However in OSM places are points not area's and the areas we do have
> are either to do with admin (ie Counties, Borough's etc) and hence are
> rather less than helpful.
> 
> The is_in tag is not a lot of use either due to it being inconsistent.
> 
> I could do it with some kind of nearest function but I don't think
> this is going to give me the right answer either.
> 
> What is in a place, is often to do with other geographic features,
> like gaps in housing, majro roads etc, and also to do with history,
> 
> What I would like to do is write a script that takes the planet and
> gives a list of the places (towns, villages etc) and a polygon/area
> for each place.
> 
> While I don't think this list would be worth piping back in to the
> database, it might be useful for knowing what were missing.....
> 
> Maybe Places should be area's rather than points anyway.

This is a quite complicated thing to do - Some parts of the world
fill very quickly with admin boundaries and using them for searching
in the garmins would definitly give them a strong boost which i'd like
to see.

The other point is that people are used to fuzzy or non exact search. For
example i am living in a Town called Rietberg which has a large area it covers.
There are multiple suburbs which are very distinct from Rietberg the town
itself. People are used to be able to search for either Rietberg or
even the suburbs names e.g. "Mastholte" or "Varensell" - So in google
ou can search for

	Alt Hammoor 38, Rietberg, Germany
	Alt Hammoor 38, Mastholte, Germany

which is the same place - Postal wise the address is 33397 Rietberg
but all in car navigations are happy to accept Mastholte aswell.

This gets more complicated taking large citys like Berlin - where the
individual districts are their own administration and therefor have their
own admin_level 8 boundary. People on the other hand are used to search
for Gorßbeerenstraßen, Berlin to work - e.g. spit out all the Großbeerenstraße
Berlin has (Mentioning the District - TomTom does this).

So - it comes down that people are used to search for admin_level=10 names
and content and for admin_level=6 Content which will then look for all
content in admin_level=6+  ..

So - i'd vote for strictly using admin boundarys and invent some tags
for giving some hints - It does not make sense to include admin_level=4 
or most of the time it does not make sense to include admin_level=6 for
searching (Kreis Gütersloh for example makes no sense) - But sometimes
it should be included that you look for

	Großebeerenstraße, Berlin

and get

	Großebeerenstraße, Kreuzberg, Berlin
	Großebeerenstraße, Lichterfeld, Berlin

aswell as beeing able to search for

	Großebeerenstraße, Kreuzberg

Searching for place nodes and guessing is prone to errors and hinting will be
on a per street level which will be very hard to maintain and include so ...
Admin boundarys are there for a reason ...

Flo
-- 
Florian Lohoff                                         flo at rfc822.org
"Es ist ein grobes Missverständnis und eine Fehlwahrnehmung, dem Staat
im Internet Zensur- und Überwachungsabsichten zu unterstellen."
- - Bundesminister Dr. Wolfgang Schäuble -- 10. Juli in Berlin 
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