Re: [Talk-us] Hamlets!
On 06/21/2013 08:07 PM, Serge Wroclawski wrote: The map should reflect ground reality, so unless there are hamlets in these places, we should strive to fix them. By sharing our experiences, we can have a better sense of how others are doing that, and we can use that to inform our local decisions. But let the locals make the decisions! Don't just go deleting hamlets based on the fact that they are unincorporated. A great many hamlets in New York State have a strong local identity. The locals can tell you their precise borders. They are signed. The post offices and railroad stations are named for them. If you ask a local what town he lives in, he'll reply with the name of the hamlet. A resident of Woodmere, New York - a well-defined hamlet with identifiable borders - will be puzzled or even offended if you say that he's a resident of Hempstead (the name of the containing township). And there was some rather heated political turmoil a few years ago when the town of Clifton Park posted large Welcome to Clifton Park signs at its borders. Eventually, they were forced to replace them with signs that read something like WELCOME TO REXFORD - Town of Clifton Park with the Town of Clifton Park in much smaller lettering. Because to the locals, Rexford is not Clifton Park - it just happens to be in the township of that name. Even within New York City, some of the hamlets very much keep their identity and their borders. In the boroughs of Queens and Staten Island, the names of the post offices are for the most part the names of the hamlets, and the locals, once again, identify with them. Even though Neponsit or Woodhaven or Astoria may have no separate political identity, mail is still addressed under those names, and the locals respond first with those names when asked where they live. (I'll say that I was born in Queens only when I'm not talking to a fellow native: if I am talking to a fellow New Yorker, I was born in Far Rockaway.) Of course, New York's local administration is complicated. School districts, fire districts, post office service areas, and the like frequently have borders that fail to follow the borders of the municipalities. -- 73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Hamlets!
On 6/22/13 11:42 AM, Kevin Kenny wrote: On 06/21/2013 08:07 PM, Serge Wroclawski wrote: The map should reflect ground reality, so unless there are hamlets in these places, we should strive to fix them. By sharing our experiences, we can have a better sense of how others are doing that, and we can use that to inform our local decisions. But let the locals make the decisions! Don't just go deleting hamlets based on the fact that they are unincorporated. A great many hamlets in New York State have a strong local identity. The locals can tell you their precise borders. They are signed. The post offices and railroad stations are named for them. If you ask a local what town he lives in, he'll reply with the name of the hamlet. the city of Lansingburgh merged with Troy, NY more than 100 years ago but Lansingburgh still has a very strong local identity. the post office still delivers to Lansingburgh, the school district is distinct from the Troy district, and back when i lived there i told people Lansingburgh, not Troy. and people who know the difference will still tell you rather pointedly that Lansingburgh is distinct from North Troy. so yes, we need to defer to local mappers on this one. richard ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Hamlets!
On 22/giu/2013, at 17:42, Kevin Kenny kken...@nycap.rr.com wrote: and we can use that to inform our local decisions. But let the locals make the decisions! Don't just go deleting hamlets based on the fact that they are unincorporated. A great many hamlets in New York State have a strong local identity +1 to your whole post, it is important not to confuse place with administrative units, they are orthogonal (but often also coincide, hence the risk of seeing them as the same thing) cheers, Martin ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Hamlets!
* Serge Wroclawski emac...@gmail.com [2013-06-21 09:17 -0400]: During the TIGER import, small neighborhoods were imported as hamlets. I tend to think of the GNIS hamlets as small places-where-people-live. Around my section of the Baltimore suburbs, most of them are housing developments, apartment complexes, trailer parks or similar. Some, however, do correspond to things that people would more readily describe as towns or suburbs. (Interestingly, none of Baltimore's neighborhoods shoed up in the GNIS import. All of the GNIS place=* nodes stop at the city line.) For the most part, I retag these nodes as landuse=residential unless I am reasonably certain they correspond to a larger place designation, in which case I give them an appropriate place= value. I have something of an advantage based on my location, because nowhere in the immediate Baltimore metropolitan region is there a place that would qualify as a hamlet (because the suburbs are all wide-ranging enough to be place=village or, in some cases, place=town). Note that I usually leave the nodes tagged landuse=residential, unless I'm in the mood for figuring out subdividion boundaries based on subdivision plats. I know that the landuse= tags make more sense on areas than on nodes, but it seems more correct to me than leaving the node tagged place=hamlet. I'm wondering what other people's experience with the hamlets are. Are they useful where you live? Are they nonsense (as they have been in NYC and DC)? I don't think they're nonsense. I think most of them in my area don't qualify for place= tagging, but most of them do correspond to *something* that actually exists. (Not all; if I can't match a node to a place name or subdivision, I'll just delete it, but that's not tremendously common in my experience..) -- ...computer contrarian of the first order... / http://aperiodic.net/phil/ PGP: 026A27F2 print: D200 5BDB FC4B B24A 9248 9F7A 4322 2D22 026A 27F2 --- -- Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account. --- -- ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Hamlets!
* Elliott Plack elliott.pl...@gmail.com [2013-06-21 21:01 -0400]: In the city of Baltimore, we have over 250 well defined neighborhoods, yet their boundaries are defined by a planning dept., not the people per se. Most of the neighborhoods have nodes place=suburb, but it probably should be place=neighborhood. I put those there and at the time place=suburb seemed the best tag to use; place=neighborhood wasn't yet in common use. Based on my understanding of current usage of the tags, most should probably be place=neighborhood, but the larger or more prominent neighborhoods (like Hampden or Fells Point) should get place=suburb, in a vein similar to the distinctions between place=town/village/hamlet. -- ...computer contrarian of the first order... / http://aperiodic.net/phil/ PGP: 026A27F2 print: D200 5BDB FC4B B24A 9248 9F7A 4322 2D22 026A 27F2 --- -- #define NULL 0 /* silly thing is, we don't even use this */ -- perl.c, perl source code --- -- ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
[Talk-us] Hamlets!
During the TIGER import, small neighborhoods were imported as hamlets. I am not sure what this means in rural areas, but in urban places, hamlets are often just places like apartment complexes, or other nondescript places. They don't rise to the prominence of even a neighborhood (putting aside the neighborhood discussion from last week), but they do confuse the heck out of both mappers and the tools. I'm wondering what other people's experience with the hamlets are. Are they useful where you live? Are they nonsense (as they have been in NYC and DC)? I'm thinking that it might be worthwhile to take some kind of action, either converting them to something else, or if there's really consensus, deleting them. 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, what do people think? - Serge ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Hamlets!
On 6/21/13 9:17 AM, Serge Wroclawski wrote: During the TIGER import, small neighborhoods were imported as hamlets. I am not sure what this means in rural areas, but in urban places, hamlets are often just places like apartment complexes, or other nondescript places. i think this varies state-to-state. the following applies to NY. hamlets are not incorporated areas and have no government functions. 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. 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. the CDP boundaries are at best vaguely related to the post office delivery routes sharing the name. richard ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Hamlets!
On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 9:32 AM, Richard Welty rwe...@averillpark.net wrote: i think this varies state-to-state. the following applies to NY. hamlets are not incorporated areas and have no government functions. 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. 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. the CDP boundaries are at best vaguely related to the post office delivery routes sharing the name. 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. 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. 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? - Serge ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Hamlets!
Around here they seem to just be somewhat random areas of town. Not formal neighborhoods or anything. Examples: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/151609519 http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/151882535 I've already deleted a couple of others because they didn't make much sense and caused odd geocoding in Nominatim. Toby On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 8:32 AM, Richard Welty rwe...@averillpark.netwrote: On 6/21/13 9:17 AM, Serge Wroclawski wrote: During the TIGER import, small neighborhoods were imported as hamlets. I am not sure what this means in rural areas, but in urban places, hamlets are often just places like apartment complexes, or other nondescript places. i think this varies state-to-state. the following applies to NY. hamlets are not incorporated areas and have no government functions. 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. 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. the CDP boundaries are at best vaguely related to the post office delivery routes sharing the name. richard __**_ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.**org/listinfo/talk-ushttp://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Hamlets!
It sounds like we want CDPs and not hamlets, although there is some overlap. What would be ideal would be to remove all the hamlets and import the CDPs, but we could also just remove all hamlets that aren't also a CDP. On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 8:20 AM, Serge Wroclawski emac...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 9:32 AM, Richard Welty rwe...@averillpark.net wrote: i think this varies state-to-state. the following applies to NY. hamlets are not incorporated areas and have no government functions. 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. 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. the CDP boundaries are at best vaguely related to the post office delivery routes sharing the name. 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. 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. 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? - Serge ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Hamlets!
Hello, Serge Wroclawski on 2013-06-21: During the TIGER import, small neighborhoods were imported as hamlets. I'm wondering what other people's experience with the hamlets are. Are they useful where you live? Are they nonsense (as they have been in NYC and DC)? I've only seen a few around here in NC. Some, such as West Park[0], marked well-defined subdivisions, and I replaced them with areas. Another one, Green Level[1], is an unincorporated community with its own Wikipedia page, and place=hamlet actually seems to be correct. I'm thinking that it might be worthwhile to take some kind of action, either converting them to something else, or if there's really consensus, deleting them. The ones that mark subdivisions may be doing more harm than good. However, the one that marked a hamlet was correct, and the hamlet could otherwise have been missed in survey, so deleting it would be a problem. 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? Sean Bartell [0] http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/204876141 [1] http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/158391394 ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Hamlets!
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? 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. 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. richard ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Hamlets!
In Pennsylvania, Villages are often labeled as Hamlets. These villages always appear within another municipality (as the entire state is incorporated). They don't have any legal entity associated with them, and they are probably becoming less important as suburbs take over the old farming areas. They are still fairly important to people in Pennsylvania as far as giving directions or discussing a location. There are also populated places (such as this one, Chickentown: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/157635699) that the locals have no idea that it exists. The people who do know about, know it because online services tell them that they are in that town. Down the road a little bit, there is another Hamlet (Hecktown: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/1993248917) which definitely exists. They have their own fire station, and people in the area generally know where it is. Hecktown is also a village, where Chickentown is not. To confuse this further, there are Census Designated Places in PA, which are very well known. Hershey ( http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/25930002) is a very good example of this, which is oddly labeled as a town, which isn't a form of government recognized in Pennsylvania (There is one exception, Bloomsburg, which is essentially a Borough, but uses the name 'town'). It should be noted that this isn't an import, although there is a boundary (Admin level 8) which is imported from TIGER. Nobody really gets this stuff right. But I think the census data is a little bit better than the GNIS data, where a lot of these hamlets came from initially. In fact, the GNIS does list when a record is connected to a Census record on their website, it just isn't published in their downloadable files. See on the GNIS website: Hershey, PA: http://geonames.usgs.gov/pls/gnispublic/f?p=gnispq:3:2307265203645995::NO::P3_FID:1176895 Chickentown, PA: http://geonames.usgs.gov/pls/gnispublic/f?p=gnispq:3:1767520712437467::NO::P3_FID:1210868 Hecktown: http://geonames.usgs.gov/pls/gnispublic/f?p=gnispq:3:1179118570263105::NO::P3_FID:1176752 So, while I like the GNIS dataset, and I actually am working on a crowdsourcing project to improve the GNIS dataset ( http://navigator.er.usgs.gov), I think the Census data is much more useful for our purposes. -- Jim McAndrew On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 9:21 AM, Richard Welty rwe...@averillpark.netwrote: 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? 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. 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. richard __**_ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.**org/listinfo/talk-ushttp://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Hamlets!
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
Re: [Talk-us] Hamlets!
On 6/21/2013 9:17 AM, Serge Wroclawski 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. I would say not to touch any hamlets; let the locals fix them up appropriately. Their presence doesn't hurt anything, aside from the small geocoding hiccup or map not rendering optimally. I'm not entirely sure how to tag apartments and subdivisions; I just convert to an area if known and choose something that renders the name. In a few cases, I deliberately left points which are fuzzy neighborhoods, but in reality define a circle of geocoder influence as today's geocoder is implemented. ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Hamlets!
On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 7:52 PM, Mike N nice...@att.net wrote: On 6/21/2013 9:17 AM, Serge Wroclawski 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. I would say not to touch any hamlets; let the locals fix them up appropriately. The goal is to share our experiences with them and determine what, if anything, should be done. It's clear that in NYC, some of them are neighborhoods, some are public housing projects, some are historical, and we aren't sure what others are. People in other places are reporting their experiences, which seem to be highly localized- everything from the data is worthless, to these hamlets are being used to describe small communities. Their presence doesn't hurt anything, aside from the small geocoding hiccup or map not rendering optimally. The map should reflect ground reality, so unless there are hamlets in these places, we should strive to fix them. By sharing our experiences, we can have a better sense of how others are doing that, and we can use that to inform our local decisions. - Serge ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Hamlets!
On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 8:07 PM, Serge Wroclawski emac...@gmail.com wrote: Their presence doesn't hurt anything, aside from the small geocoding hiccup or map not rendering optimally. The map should reflect ground reality, so unless there are hamlets in these places, we should strive to fix them. By sharing our experiences, we can have a better sense of how others are doing that, and we can use that to inform our local decisions. Of course, some of these small areas are names that mean something to the locals, but one can be only a couple of miles away and not have any idea where these places are, if one isn't actually in the neighborhood often! I happened to come across a couple of GNIS hamlets when I was doing some work and I changed a couple of them to neighborhoods because I knew they weren't hamlets and, while I hadn't heard of them, I wasn't certain enough of what different areas in this city are called to just delete them, so I changed them to neighborhood points and left them for another day. Then, a couple of days later, I saw a city press release abour road construction on a major intersection in that area, and it used the name of one of the hamlets I'd changed to a neighborhood. I've lived here for two years now, and worked here for a couple more, only about 2-3 miles from this spot, and I had never heard the name until this month. In some cases, deletion may be obvious, but I'm not sure it's always easy to know whether deletion or some other type of place more accurate than hamlet should be used, especially if one does not live within that immediate area. There is no question that they should be fixed...but the question is: is the information that is misrepresented as hamlets information that we should be preserving under more accurate tagging? Scott -- Scott Rollins, organ...@gmail.com Portsmouth, VA ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Hamlets!
Great topic Serge. A lot of the hamlets in Baltimore come from platted subdivision names, that due to extra awesome county GIS agencies that have been around for 30+ years, were in TIGER in 2000. In my county almost every subdivision is considered a hamlet, even the ones that are like Walton Property. Those are few and far between though, its mostly the platted subdivisions in the county. There are no incorporated places in Baltimore County and neighboring Howard County, so there cannot be any of the higher level place=* types. In the city of Baltimore, we have over 250 well defined neighborhoods, yet their boundaries are defined by a planning dept., not the people per se. Most of the neighborhoods have nodes place=suburb, but it probably should be place=neighborhood. Since it doesn't render though, I think people prefer not to changes. Sometimes I'll add a landuse=residential and then copy hamlet node's info to it. On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 8:07 PM, Serge Wroclawski emac...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 7:52 PM, Mike N nice...@att.net wrote: On 6/21/2013 9:17 AM, Serge Wroclawski 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. I would say not to touch any hamlets; let the locals fix them up appropriately. The goal is to share our experiences with them and determine what, if anything, should be done. It's clear that in NYC, some of them are neighborhoods, some are public housing projects, some are historical, and we aren't sure what others are. People in other places are reporting their experiences, which seem to be highly localized- everything from the data is worthless, to these hamlets are being used to describe small communities. Their presence doesn't hurt anything, aside from the small geocoding hiccup or map not rendering optimally. The map should reflect ground reality, so unless there are hamlets in these places, we should strive to fix them. By sharing our experiences, we can have a better sense of how others are doing that, and we can use that to inform our local decisions. - Serge ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us -- Elliott Plack http://about.me/elliottp ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
