I am not sure what the situation in Syria is. In Mali I am currently manually merging in the GNS place names file for the country which has a name for almost all the populated settlements in the country. These place names are not well located (usually within a few hundred meters of the town but sometimes 2 or 3 km away) so they cannot be directly imported, but if you trace all the towns in the imagery first and then compare it to the places file you can figure out what name applies to what and manually conflate them. This should ONLY be done by manual process as there are too many edge cases to properly automate it. I would suggest using this as a starting point for syria as well (although as I said I do not know the status of the data for that country so take my advice with a grain of salt).
-Buck _______________________________________________ HOT mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/hot
