vicchi's comments

vicchi | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: what features do you want in a geocoder?

Makes a lot more sense, yes. Thanks for this.

I do have to ask how realistic this is. It makes sense for places that do have multi language versions. So "Etats-Unis" for the US, when in French, makes total sense.

But does translating the Mission to "Quartier de la Mission" make sense? It makes me go "errrr?".

To put it another way, taking the ever present UK "High Street" as an example. I'd expect to see this as "High Street" regardess of language and not as "Grande Rue" because no one ever says this of uses it.

So yes, I think passing the locale to the service makes a lot of sense. Supporting those places which have multi language versions makes a lot of sense too. Translating all place names to a specific language makes less sense.

Or am I missing the point? It's always probable.

vicchi | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: what features do you want in a geocoder?

"Yahoo's Where On Earth database had a lot of this, but it doesn't seem to be available to download any more, and they didn't accept updates."

Hi Tom - as Ed says, big fan of the work you did with Flickr's shapefiles and I still use your boundaries site on a regular basis.

Yes, GeoPlanet has vanished for download from the YDN site but all versions up to 7.10 are still on archive.org (http://archive.org/search.php?query=geoplanet) thanks to the combination of Aaron of Montreal and the CC-BY-SA license we released the data under.

vicchi | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: what features do you want in a geocoder?

Can I dig a little deeper into this as your example has me indulging in some furious head scratching.

Providing language synonyms makes perfect sense where these exist (cf: London in English, Londra in Italian, Londres in French).

But your example implies translation of place names into their language specific equivalent. Kings County in Washington state is, unless I'm mistaken, Kings County in all other languages. Although the local residents may disagree, this county isn't blessed with a language synonym as it doesn't fall into the (ill defined) category of "well known place with a language variant".

Unless you're suggesting that if, say, French is requested as a language, a geocoder should translate place names so "Kings County" would (maybe) be "Comté Roi" in French. Although this approach sounds odd to me as (AFAIK) no one else refers to this place in this way?

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