[OSM-talk] Names for places based on OSM - OpenStreetBlock

[Martijn van Exel]

Neat and potentially very useful. I wonder how well it translates to non-US
/ non-urban spatial contexts. Take our local situation here in Amsterdam.
The street layout is completely different – hence all the clueless American
tourists on every street corner ;) – and people are not thinking in terms of
intersections when they are giving directions or orienting themselves.
Even so, a service that comes up with a best guess vernacular name for a
neighborhood would be very useful. I don't know of one service or dataset,
commercial or otherwise, that does this well for Amsterdam. Yahoo! GeoPlanet
is a joke. Official neighborhood polygons are available but the naming does
not correspond to the colloquial naming.
I've been thinking about what data could be used to make such a service
useful for the Amsterdam / NL / European context. It would probably need to
look at named place features (polys / nodes) in OSM first, then possibly the
flickr alpha shapes (didn't you have something to do with those?), and if
that all fails look at the nearest primary / secondary road, square or other
spatial landmark in OSM.
I might give this a try.
Martijn

On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 7:08 AM, Michal Migurski <mike at stamen.com> wrote:

> Mike Frumin put together a neat service that generates human-readable names
> based on nearby OSM ways:
>        http://frumin.net/ation/2011/04/openstreetblock.html
>
> I makes strings like "14th St between 6th Ave and 7th Ave", currently just
> for NYC data.
>
> -mike.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> michal migurski- mike at stamen.com
>                 415.558.1610
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Martijn van Exel
http://about.me/mvexel
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