[mkgmap-dev] Address search and index.

Mon Feb 14 12:20:27 GMT 2011

On 14/02/11 10:21, Steve Ratcliffe wrote:
>
>> If there are faults in the data, they should be fixed.
> Well I get England, Great Britain, Great Britian, and United Kingdom.
>
> One is spelling mistake and so, fair enough, should be fixed and there
> is not going to be any argument from anyone about that.
>
> But the others are not wrong and might be fine in other situations.
>
> A few examples from England:
>
> 	k='is_in' v='Nantwich, Cheshire, England, United Kingdom'
> 	k='is_in' v='UK, England, County Durham, Teesdale'
> 	k='is_in' v='England, Essex'
>

It's really an issue to be debated at OSM level, not mkgmap level, but I
have considered for quite a while now that the "is_in" tag should be
entirely deprecated in favour of a concept of boundary polygons. "Is_in"
is fraught with problems, some illustrated above.

The country of England should have a polygon around its border with the
tag "country=England" and therefore could also be tagged with
"country:cy=Lloegr" (and other language specifics). Any item within that
polygon would automatically considered "is_in=England" (and Lloegr to
allow for searching in Welsh). Within the England polygon would be a set
of non-intersecting polygons each tagged "county=<wherever>" and again
some of them might have foreign language variants - which would be fine.
Any item within those polygons would automatically considered
"is_in=Cumbria" or wherever (plus foreign-language variants of county
names where they exist). The nesting would continue right down to hamlets.

Notice how quickly you could fix a mistake - no need to trawl through
millions of "is_in" tags looking for inconsistencies, spelling mistakes
etc. Just fix the correct enclosing polygon.

There is a war memorial in England (not far from London) which is
officially "in" the USA! I think this is called an "enclave"... but even
an enclave situation could be handled by polygons. Why should there not
be a polygon around that site claiming "country=United States"??

The interesting question from a polygon-parsing point of view is whether
you'd need to establish a fixed heirarchy of tags each with "levels"
assumed so that if you encountered "country=" within a "county="
polygon, that the "county=" would be forgotten about within the inner
"country=" polygon. This would make sense - if that war memorial was
"in" the USA, it can hardly also be "in" Middlesex (or wherever) which
is a county of England. But see below for an alternative system...

Back to "England" again. If England is a "country", what is the UK
deemed to be? In some ways the "country" should be "UK", and "England",
"Wales", "Scotland" and "Northern Ireland" are "states". But that's not
how any resident of the UK would see it. It's just down to semantics.

You could get rid of this "what's it called" argument by requiring the
outer polygon to be tagged "political:level=1"
"political:designation=country" "name=United Kingdom" "alt-name=UK".
Further in you'd get a polygon tagged "political:level=5"
"political:designation=county" "name=Kent" and eventually (inside that)
maybe a polygon tagged "political:level=6" "political:designation=town"
"name=Canterbury". This removes the need for a fixed known hierarchy of
polygons (mentioned above when disussing the handling of enclaves) - if
you encountered a polygon with a given "political:level=" it would,
within its bounds,  cancel any supposed enclosing polygon with an equal
or higher numerical "political:level=" tag.

It also allows an easy way to handle the cases where some cities in the
UK are considered to be counties in their own right (Swansea for
instance - it is inside a polygon of "political:level=5"
"political:designation=county" "name=South Glamorganshire" but the city
itself could be polygonned as "political:level=5"
"political:designation=city and county" "name=Swansea" "name:cy=Abertawe".

In order to implement anything like this, we'd need a way to work out
quickly for any point on a map what the enclosing hierarchy of polygons
would be. That in turn probably means having to implement knowledge of
it in the splitter so that a small part of the planetary map still has
intact (but truncated) nested polygons.

PS: I guess "Great Britain" would be handled by a polygon around just
the right-hand island of the British Isles (and its sub-islands)
claiming "geographical:level=1" "name=Great Britain" "name:de=Groß
Britannien" "name:fr=Grande Bretagne" etc.

Mkgmap would probably not be interested in "geographical:*" tags.