[OSM-talk] What Streets are in what Places

Peter Childs pchilds at bcs.org
Fri Nov 13 15:58:27 GMT 2009


2009/11/13 Florian Lohoff <flo at rfc822.org>:
> 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


The problem with admin boundaries, here in the Uk anyway is that they
have very little to do with the towns or places they actually are
around.

Admin_level tends to suggest a simple hierarchy that does not exists.
and tends from what I've seen here to be related to govenment admin
stration areas, Parish, Borough, County etc etc.

Peter




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