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.net>wrote: > 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<http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us> >
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