[OSM-talk] Nominatim & US places

Greg Troxel gdt at ir.bbn.com
Tue Jan 4 02:51:08 GMT 2011


Richard Welty <rwelty at averillpark.net> writes:

> what i see a bit right now in the US are places where we have
> a central node from one import and a boundary with the same
> name from another, and as a result two names showing up.
> it's mildly annoying.

That may be true but Kurt is right.    For most towns in New England
there is a polygon for the boundary, and then a specific place, often an
intersection or a village green or a few streets that should properly be
labeled as a point.

If having a polygon with the name and a point with the name as a
"populated place" produces two names on the map, then the rendering is
arguably broken.  It may be that if the town center point is in the map
view, the label should be put more or less there.  But if it isn't, then
there shoudl be some label on both sides of the boundary with the two
town names.   Choosing labeling by context is a bit of an art in
manually-prepared maps, and we should expect that writing programs to do
it is also an art.  In the OSM db we should encode as much semantics as
is cleanly possible and not worry too much about what today's renderers
do - there's a lot worse that can happen besides two town names.
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