I need your help please... (Thank you to those of you who have started already before I'd even finished preparing the page!)
While the name finder search currently does quite a good job of handling nuances of names in different languages, it can't currently find categories of things in anything other than English (British English at that). The recent mention of trying to search for "train stations near New York" for example, doesn't work. Nor does "gares pres [de] Paris" (or even "railway stations near Cambridge" as I only currently do one category term, which in this case is just "stations"). One of the things I want to do in a revamp of the name finder ahead of doing a complete regeneration of the index over Christmas is to offer alternative category terms in multiple languages, so that "gares pres Paris" and the like does work. I have started a page here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Name_finder:Translations to collect translations. Please help by adding your own languages and variations to it. Anything added by December 24 that is sensible and feasible will go in - anything later I will add with the next reload in the middle of 2009). I haven't listed every feature (it is hard to imaging someone looking for "covered reservoirs near Cambridge" and "feux pres de Nancy", for example, though if you feel like adding equivalences for categories not listed, please do. But remember that while this is loosely based on map features, it is about human searchability: hence several tag combinations might be found with one search term (e.g. supermarket for shop=supermarket and amenity=supermarket), and vice-versa (mosque from religion=islam or moslem or muslim). I wonder whether the same list might serve as a possible API equivalence table in the future, where one can set the API to work in your own language and it translates to and from the canonical (c/f "Barangays" discussion earlier). But at present there are things I don't do: highways for example are only searched by name not category (and I propose to leave it that way because of the somewhat specialized vocabulary and somewhat arbitrary categorization; a search for just "streets near ..." is also not terribly helpful in its own right because of the number of hits, but will be covered separately by a forthcoming gazetteer facility). I'm also reconsidering adding "in" as well as "near" (and comma) as the separator. The problem is that there are a couple of place names in England which have "In" in their names - Henley-In-Arden for example. (A second problem is that since it works only by proximity, "in" will yeild things that are wildly not "in" somewhere, but that's outweighed by what people naturally type, I think). However, I think I may use some subtle capitalization to deal with these minor cases. But extending the separator to multiple languages may cause some clashes, and many I wouldn't be aware of. For example, are there any French (or any language) names of the form "X pres de Y"? David _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk