[OSM-talk] address parsing by nominatim

[john at jfeldredge.com]

A common settlement pattern in the USA, in rural communities that have mostly or entirely developed since the invention of the automobile, is to have houses and small businesses strung out along a highway.  You end up with a community that can be several miles long, and yet only a hundred feet or so wide.  If the community was started prior to the automobile, it may have a small portion laid out as a grid or loose mesh of streets, with the oldest structures there.  The linear portions are where a farmer sold the land immediately adjacent to the highway, for house construction, but continued to farm on the rest of his land.  The non-farmers are likely to commute to jobs in another, larger community nearby.

-------Original Email-------
Subject :Re: [OSM-talk] address parsing by nominatim
From  :mailto:dieterdreist at gmail.com
Date  :Tue Jan 11 11:31:35 America/Chicago 2011


2011/1/11 Stephen Hope <slhope at gmail.com>:
> 2011/1/10 ヴィカス　ヤダヴァ (vikas yadav) <mevikas at gmail.com>:
>> I used hamlet for my block as pop limit of <1000 is given = satisfied
>
> The problem here is that population is only part of the definition of
> a hamlet.  Less than 1000 people is correct, but it also has an
> implied "and is surrounded by open land/farms etc".  You can't have a
> whole bunch of adjacent hamlets sharing borders, they are not hamlets.

+1

the wiki is not very good when defining hamlets (and other places)
IMHO. Although we don't seem to have real problems with that, as
localized versions of the site give different numbers (e.g. hamlet
below 200 in Germany). The main classification for place as it is
handled in the real world (and also the real OSM world) takes into
account different aspects. The number of inhabitants is only a rough
estimate. E.g. a town is a town when it is a town ;-). This is tagged
mainly on a functional and historical (a town in Germany or Italy is a
town by definition, not dependent on the population, I guess this is
the same in most of the world) basis and has to take into account the
surrounding as well. Besides a big city a village can be more then
10000 inhabitants, and small towns can have less then 2000 (in
exceptional cases).

A hamlet is different from a village not only because it is smaller,
it also functionally doesn't offer community services (church, shop,
place to gather etc.). The houses are typically not arranged in a
closed way but rather scattered (again, this depends very much on the
cultural/settlement traditions and cannot be generalized, of course
there are also villages with scattered houses). But a hamlet is not a
block or sector of a bigger settlement.

cheers,
Martin

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-- 
John F. Eldredge -- john at jfeldredge.com
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is better than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria