[OSM-talk] Improving on the NGA placenames data
Dear Experts, For a while I've been hacking together a digital picture frame application that shows my geo-located photos on a world map. At the moment I'm using the NASA blue marble satellite imagery for the basemap, which works well (and looks nice) at the sort of scale that I'm interested in. I've just been experimenting with superimposing the NGA place names data (http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/namefiles.htm). As is noted on the OSM wiki, this data is not perfect but it's a lot better than nothing. In particular, for many countries it has no ranking of place importance, and for things like rivers and mountains it has no ranking at all. (I haven't yet worked out whether there is ranking for administrative areas but I don't think there is.) Also, the town/city rankings that it does have don't seem to be very comparable from one country to another. So I was wondering whether anyone here knows how I could improve on this, i.e. - Is there an improved version somewhere with more ranking information in it? - Is there other data that I could cross-reference it with to extract ranking? (For example, lists of national capitals, regional capitals, etc. or cities/regions by population or area. Or rivers by length or mountains by height etc.) - Is there some sort of algorithm that I could use to guestimate rankings? (I have considered counting the number of google hits for each one!) - Is there equivalent data in the OSM database, with rankings of some sort, that I could extract a dump of? I'm sure there's someone out there who has thought about these problems before. Any suggestions? Thanks, Phil. p.s. Every time I visit openstreetmap.org I'm more and more impressed by the quality and scale of what's been achieved. I sometimes think I should help, but everywhere I go already seems to have been immaculately surveyed. Congratulations to everyone involved. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Improving on the NGA placenames data
On Tue, June 24, 2008 17:13, Phil Endecott wrote: So I was wondering whether anyone here knows how I could improve on this, i.e. - Is there an improved version somewhere with more ranking information in it? www.geonames.org ? They aggregate lots of data sources and tend to have more place nodes in remote areas of the world. - Is there equivalent data in the OSM database, with rankings of some sort, that I could extract a dump of? You could parse the is_in tags / relations. In general, you found one of our bigger unsolved problems ;-) Regards, Hakan -- The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering... ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Improving on the NGA placenames data
www.geonames.org ? They aggregate lots of data sources and tend to have more place nodes in remote areas of the world. There are concerns about the 'legality' of the geonames data. see: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Geonames Mungewell. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Improving on the NGA placenames data
Hakan Tandogan wrote: On Tue, June 24, 2008 17:13, Phil Endecott wrote: So I was wondering whether anyone here knows how I could improve on this, i.e. - Is there an improved version somewhere with more ranking information in it? www.geonames.org ? They aggregate lots of data sources and tend to have more place nodes in remote areas of the world. Thanks; I'll have a look. I thought it was basically the same as the NGA data. - Is there equivalent data in the OSM database, with rankings of some sort, that I could extract a dump of? You could parse the is_in tags / relations. In general, you found one of our bigger unsolved problems ;-) The slippy map seems to do a good-enough job of choosing which city names to display on a zoomed-out map. How does it do that? Phil. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
