Just to take us away again from the rather specific topic of place name searching to generalise a bit, I am toying with the idea of making the search less syntactic (albeit it is a simple somewhat naturalistic syntax at present) and more analytic (based on context) to try to determine exactly what it is you're looking for. The "Washington, D.C." example is a classic with the comma and periods that people will naturally type and I think I should be able to cope with.
The most common search is for just a place name, but people also put in full street addresses, or qualify by US state (as this is a common thing to do linguistically, "Portland, ME", but is well-nigh impossible to do from the data just in in OSM at present) and so on. To this end can I ask for crowd source help again. I'd like to gather together a collection of street address formats from around the world. Some countries put house numbers after the street name, some put postcodes before the town name and so on. Could you add examples from your own countries to this page please: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Name_finder/Address_format Thanks, David PS Thank you to everyone who has added to the translations page http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Name_finder:Translations Italian is a notable absentee so far in European languages (Norwegian among others is also missing). But we're really short on non-latin languages: Russian, Chinese, Japanese, indo-chinese languages, Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi and so on. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
