Richard Welty wrote: > the real problem is that the tagging scheme we are using didn't consider the > divergence between postal and administrative city names and is insufficiently > rich to express the details.
I agree. There are areas near me in unincorporated Orange County that can go by multiple names, and I'm not sure how to tag them. Ref, about a mile from my house: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/33.6816/-117.6279&layers=N This is a modern development right next to very old mountain neighborhoods, and though the development name is Portola Hills, and that's how most of the locals (including me) refer to it, the post office "prefers" Trabuco Canyon, which is a wider region that encompases an actual canyon some miles away. The name (and region) Trabuco Canyon goes back more than 200 years. How does one decide what to call it? My inclination is to tag addr:city = Portola Hills, because that's how most people refer to it. And a new development is going in right next to it known as Portola Center, and that's likely to add that name to the mix (and not even considering if they get annexed by the City of Lake Forest, where I live, which would change actual administrative boundaries). Steve -- who realizes that he's helping hijack a thread about America's Finest City -----Original Message----- From: Richard Welty [mailto:rwe...@averillpark.net] Sent: Tuesday, November 10, 2015 8:24 AM To: talk-us@openstreetmap.org Subject: Re: [Talk-us] San Diego Address Import Update On 11/10/15 11:09 AM, Clifford Snow wrote: > > On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 7:48 AM, Tod Fitch <t...@fitchdesign.com > <mailto:t...@fitchdesign.com>> wrote: > > So what is a good definition for what should go in the addr:city > tag? If it is based on being within a formal administrative > boundary then we may not need the tag at all as it should be easy > for a data consumer to detect that. I have come to the conclusion > that the addr:city is best to indicate what the locals feel their > town name is. In the western US my impression is that has a high > correlation with the USPS designation. Further, when dealing with > any financial or government entity, it seems the city they want to > hear about is the one the post office delivers to, not some subset > or superset defined by a formal boundary of an incorporated town > or city. So equating the post office town name with the OSM > addr:city value seems proper to me. > > > +1 > the real problem is that the tagging scheme we are using didn't consider the divergence between postal and administrative city names and is insufficiently rich to express the details. it'd be good to consider what the actual use cases are for the data. the most obvious one is geocoding, and a case can be made that geocoders based on both types of city names are useful. i can also imagine querying OSM for the data for other GIS style purposes and wanting either type. at the present time, we can derive admin city from admin boundaries if they are present. if we discard the postal city name, though, we can't derive it from any thing else in OSM, as there are no postal boundaries that function like city admin boundaries. you can sort of fake it using census bureau ZCTA boundaries, but the mapping from ZCTA to city is missing and it would take a bit of work to put that together. richard -- rwe...@averillpark.net Averill Park Networking - GIS & IT Consulting OpenStreetMap - PostgreSQL - Linux Java - Web Applications - Search _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
