GeoNames Forum

Hi, Marc:

several doubts about the field isOfficialName in AlternateNames file:

1. The "official name" is the official name in all the languages or the official name in each language?
I think it's the official name in each language: if I have 3 alternatenames is "english", one of then (if only one) will be the official name.
If this is thus, only it must have an official name marked with "1" by each geonameId and each language, not? If this is thus, there is several erroneous data, for example:

3120004 l' Ametlla de Mar ca Catalan x
3120004 l'Ametlla de Mar ca Catalan x

3115131 Ollo eu Basque x
3115131 Olloibar eu Basque x

704055 Nagykirva hu Hungarian x
704055 Tiszakirva hu Hungarian x

If you want, I will send you more data of this.

2. If the subject is like I say in point 1, could be considered another field additional, specifying then "official name" of the city, independently of the language? That is to say, the name by which officially is well-known the city in the own city.
For example: in Spain, the city Lérida:
Official Name in spanish: Lérida
Official Name in catalán: Lleida
And the officially: is Lleida. You can see it in:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lerida:
Lérida: although officially referred as Lleida)
Another example: in Spain, the city Vitoria:
Official Name in spanish: Vitoria
Official Name in basque: Gasteiz
And the officially: is Vitoria-Gasteiz. You can see it in:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitoria
known officially as Vitoria-Gasteiz

You will already say to me how you see this subject.

3. One last question: in geonames table, the field "name" of the geolocations is in english language in most of times, not? And in the other times, the name is in the language of the location country? There is some way to know in which language is a name?
Because, the name of geonames table, is not in the alternateNames table, not?

If I have not explained myself well, ask me what you need to know.
Thanks and regards,
Isa

Hi Isa

1. This should not happen. I have added a check to make sure only one name can be marked as official per language. I have not yet changed the existing duplicate markes.

2. Maybe we should add a field 'languages spoken at this place' in the order of importance? The first language will be the 'official' one. What do you think?

3. This is a fight between contributors. I would prefer to have the international name as the main name on geonames. If we have the information in the alternate names table then it does not matter since all users of the geonames dump can decide what they want to do.

Cheers

Marc

Hi again, Marc:

1. Ok, with the control check for ensuring only one name can be marked as official per language, it's all right.
If I can tomorrow, I will try to repair some of the data of Spain.

2. A field 'languages spoken at this place' in the order of importance would be fine. I suppose it would be something similar to the field "languages" of the countryInfo.txt file, for example:
fr-BE,nl-BE,de-BE,en-BE,wa,yi
But, a little doubt: How we are sure that first lenguage that people has filled is the official? It can be that somebody adds a language, but that is not the official.
And if we used the same field "officialname", but with the value 2 to indicate the official name in general? On this way, it's safe who has put the value 2, has wanted to put the official name. And it would be necessary to control that for each geonameId only there were a 2.
What do you think?

3. If in the alternate names we have also the "main name", specifying his language, it's perfect to me. Or if always the main name is in english, also it's ok.

Uf, by the moment, nothing else.
Thanks and regards,
Isa

Hi again:
The option I said you yesterday, about the 2 value, is not useful for all cases:
For example:
* Vitoria-Gasteiz is the official name of the city, and is the sum of two languages: spanish and basque.
* Ainsa-Sobrarbe is another official name, but isn't the official name in a
certain language.

Perhaps:
we can use the alternateName file, for the official name, but without especifying the language.
That is to say: language null, alternatename=officialname and value=2.
The previous example:

Vitoria-Gasteiz 2
es Vitoria 1
bq Gasteiz 1

Ainsa-Sobrarbe 2
es Ainsa 1

Lleida 2
ca Lleida 1
es Lérida 1

How do you see this?

Regards,
Isa

Another posibility:

-- Vitoria-Gasteiz 2 (official)
es Vitoria 1
eu Gasteiz 1

es Aínsa-Sobrarbe 2 (it's spanish, but all people use "Aínsa")
es Aínsa 1

ca Lleida 3 (2 (official city name) + 1 (official in this languaje) = 3)
es Lérida 1

marc wrote:

Maybe we should add a field 'languages spoken at this place' in the order of importance? The first language will be the 'official' one. What do you think?

I think the list of local languages is a good idea, but the notions of "order of importance" and "first language" are definitely bad ideas. Such notions might be very contentious in many places, where "native" language(s) have been fighting for ages with "official" languages, often imposed from above or abroad by history, colonization ... Very touchy subjects, and being aware that such conflicts exist, we are no one to declare "the winner is ...". So my 2 cents proposal is as follows :

1. A name is an "official name" when it is endorsed by local authorities. There should be one and only one such name in each local official language, and they should not be sorted by rank.
2. For other languages (non-official) we should have the notion of "preferred name" - at most one in each language, the rule in multilingual thesauri. For example "Rome" would the preferred name of "Roma" in French. In RDF "official name" would be a subproperty of "preferred name".
3. The "name" (current value of geonames:name in RDF) is actually a "display name". It is the result of a consensus, of which rules may vary and depend on a lot of parameters. It might or not be one of the official names. The fact that the language of this "display name" is not specified is not a bug, it's a feature, and should be kept. In the best of worlds, actually, we would not need to define that "display name" at all, it would be the preferred name in the preferred language of the user IHM, and based on content negotiation.
4. A true "alternate name" is any name which is not preferred. Its language should generally be specified, but with exceptions. Think of airport codes for airports, which bear no language.

Hi Marc,

The concept of 'official language' is really not clear. As example 'Lérida' or
'Lleida', Isa said before that in spanish the official name is 'Lérida' this is not true, please see ( I'm sorry but this link is only available in spanish ) :

http://www.derecho.com/xml/disposiciones/min/disposicion.xml?id_disposicion=43348&desde=min

The official name in Spain is 'Lleida' but some spanish people use 'Lérida' for historical reasons (my fathers as example). Everybody in Spain knows 'Lérida', but I'm sure that currently there are people that only know 'Lérida'.

In Spain there are one official language all around the country but with some co-official languages in some regions, and in this regions the name
of the places usually are in the co-official language.

A different problem is Belgium. There are three official languages all around the country, but each region uses one language more than the others.

Then I think that is better to use a 'official language' related to a area down the country (region, province... ). It can be more accurate that
use one language per country.

Regards
Gabi

Gabi

I think that is better to use a 'official language' related to a area down the country (region, province... ). It can be more accurate that
use one language per country.

Agreed, and when I propose that an official language is a language "endorsed by local authorities", local means local, so it can be at a country level, or regional level. In France, Corsican names are now used 'officially' in Corsica, so are Breton names in Brittany, along with the French ones. So e.g., http://www.geonames.org/3038334/ should have both Ajaccio (FR) and Aiacciu (CO) as official names. This is quite recent, though, in the 70's the local languages activists were tagging the official signposts in French with the Corsican or Breton names ...

I believe nobody is really happy with the word 'is Official Name' and we should rename this to 'is preferred Name'. A place can have more than one preferred name. In fact it could have a preferred name for each language. The capital of France 'Paris' could have a preferred name in Japanese if there are several alternate names in Japanese available and we want to indicate which one is usually preferred by Japanese speakers.

On the country level we have a list of languages spoken in the country like "fr-FR,de-FR,br,co,oc" for France. The languages are ordered by the number of people that speak this language in the country. We only consider official languages in this field. For Switzerland we have "de-CH,fr-CH,it-CH,rm", though more people in Switzerland speak Portuguese, Spanish or Turkish as their mother language than Romansh.
The information is available in dump directory in the 'countryInfo.txt' file : http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/countryInfo.txt

What is missing is information about the languages spoken in a province. We can add a new file to the download 'admin1Info.txt' with these attributes :

countryCode, adminCode1, geonameid, name, ascii name, languages (ordered by number speakers), ISO 3166-2 code, Fips code

With this information an application should be able to display the 'local' name in most cases. It will not be sufficient for all cases. I fear it will become too complex if we try to solve all possible cases.
The files "admin1Codes.txt" and "admin1CodesASCII.txt" will become obsolete as all information is then combined in the file 'admin1Info.txt'.