On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 9:32 AM, Richard Welty <rwe...@averillpark.net> wrote:
> hamlets are not incorporated areas and have no government functions.
Virtually always true, in my experience. However, a hamlet might
find itself inside of an incorporated city limit (say, for historical
reasons). See below.
> in urban areas, hamlets are generally once distinct communities
that have been absorbed into larger entities. they have no legal standing,
> but frequently the postal service will still deliver based on the name.
Virtually always true, in my experience. But note how this smears
together history, what hamlets "are," and what the post office does
with them. It is useful to call attention to these three (and other
semantic aspects) of entities in OSM, hamlets being a good example.
There are data, and there are the algorithms that consume them.
> in rural areas in NY, hamlets generally have white on green road signs
erected by the state highway department and may have a CDP boundary.
local post offices and/or school districts may use the same name as the
> hamlet.
Ditto: what the DOT does and the federal Census Bureau (and post
offices, school districts) do are important considerations of how
data such as "here is a hamlet" ARE USED, and might INFLUENCE what we
do with hamlets, but we must keep in mind how both a data structure
(point, polygon...) AND an algorithm (geocoder, addressing index...)
are important to whatever final result is being sought. IT IS BOTH.
> the CDP boundaries are at best vaguely related to the post office delivery
routes sharing the name.
See? You have conflated the semantics of mail and census, and you
get a mess. Don't do that. (Or if you do, be smart about it, rather
than just expecting it to work from lazy assumptions).
Serge Wroclawski wrote:
I'm disinclined to touch a CDP based on my experience of living in
one. In some places, they have the same function as a town.
Agreed: CDPs are useful. In many places, they are the only entity
in the map that resembles organized human settlement of thousands
upon thousands of people. Let's not blithely throw that away, but
keep CDPs as the oddities that they are. (Just in a proper OSM
framework where data consumption tools properly recognize and respect
them as such).
In NYC and DC, the hamlets were not places I'd ever heard of (even if
they were close by). If they're just apartments, then it seems silly
to keep them around, even if the post office delivers to them.
We should keep around the actual entities they deign to represent,
but perhaps more accurately for what they actually are (an apartment
complex, a mobile home park, a subdivision...). This is done with
better tags on data (and perhaps polygons instead of nodes, where
appropriate), and smarter algorithms that consume those data. High
quality data (with smart tags and the proper structure) + high
quality algorithms (that smartly recognize the proper broad spectrum
of data entities within their scope) = high quality results! Well,
usually.
So if I read you correctly, it seems like in urban areas that we know
it's generally safe to reclassify them (either as a building, or
building complex (as a multipolygon), or perhaps a neighborhood.
Is that a fair statement?
Yes, provided we properly enter data into OSM that is accurate for
what these entities are, tagged correctly.
On 6/21/13 11:07 AM, Sean Bartell wrote:
I realized only after last week's discussion about neighborhoods that
the hamlets (which are distinct from nehighborhoods) are the things
messing up the geocoder. A neighborhood is understood to be a place
that's not often in an address, but a hamlet is a village, and so a
hamlet in the middle of an urban place doesn't make sense.
So a hamlet within municipal boundaries is almost certainly wrong. Could
we try to detect which imported hamlets are within cities, and delete
them or change them to place=neighbourhood?
A village might be a larger version of a hamlet: VERY roughly
speaking, both are "unincorporated communities" (too small to
incorporate). Say a hamlet is "a settlement with less than 100-200
inhabitants" (as our wiki does). Our wiki also notes
place=isolated_dwelling, a settlement of "not more than two
households." Yet this page also says something (crucial) which I
believe true of hamlets as well: "They are outside other settlements
(this does not mean that they are outside administrative boundaries)
and form by themselves a settlement." Let's be clear: hamlets ALSO
have this quirk of not necessarily being outside of administrative
boundaries. Yet they may also be outside of administrative
boundaries. Algorithms need to accommodate this actuality.
Richard Welty wrote:
i think we need to pull things like CDPs and hamlets out of the
admin_boundary framework and confine it strictly to real government
administration (and i think things like fire districts should be excluded
from the admin_boundary framework as well). i have heard the argument
that all of these things can be considered administrative, but this
become so broad and general that you end up with a useless mess.
Agreed: I have converted my local CDPs from boundary=administrative
to boundary=census and believe fire districts and universities and
such don't belong in the strict hierarchy of boundary=administrative.
i also think the US is a little peculiar in that our official addressing
derives solely from postal routes, which can differ significantly from
the admin boundary framework. this is one of the issues with virtually
all of the data consumers that try to handle this; european assumptions
are the norm and the US isn't europe. i see this in the address handling
for things like OsmAnd and mkgmap as well. i suspect we need some
algorithmic changes in these entities to reflect US reality; fiddling the
data is only a bandaid.
Well, "fiddling the data is only a bandaid" is partly true. Fiddling
the data AND fiddling the algorithms that consume them are the more
complete solution. Richard has hit the bulls-eye: it's both. As a
corollary, for best results to be expected, both must be different in
different parts of the world, that's just the way the world is.
SteveA
California
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