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Guidelines improvement suggestion  XML
Forum Index -> Discussion of GeoNames Toponyms
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hostesspromoter



Joined: 03/09/2012 19:03:11
Messages: 2
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I suggest the user manual could be improved to reduce inconsistencies in the alternate names.
Let's take for instance the alternate names for Democratic People's Republic of Korea:

Code:
 +-----------------+-------------+-----------------------------------------+-----------------+-------------+
 | alternateNameId | isolanguage | alternateName                           | isPreferredName | isShortName |
 +-----------------+-------------+-----------------------------------------+-----------------+-------------+
 |         1562736 | en          | North Korea                             |               0 |           1 |
 |         4651712 | en          | Democratic People’s Republic of Korea   |               1 |           0 |
 |         1562753 | it          | Corea del Nord                          |               0 |           0 |
 |         2421721 | it          | Corea, Repubblica Popolare Democratica  |               1 |           0 |
 +-----------------+-------------+-----------------------------------------+-----------------+-------------+
 


  • Corea, Repubblica Popolare Democratica is probably due to the need of sorting the entry in some user interface, practice which is plain wrong to my eyes;
  • Corea del Nord is the commonly used name (hence should be "preferred"), while Repubblica Popolare Democratica di Corea is the official name (this Wikipedia article is authoritative enough to me);
  • unfortunately isShortName often happens to also apply to common names, so we don't have a good way to mark a name as official.

    My proposal to improve the guidelines:

  • use official names (international or English) in the main Geonames table;
  • either:
    1. stress that being an official name isn't enough for it to be set preferred (often it is the opposite, so most official names are expected to be neither preferred nor short);
    2. use isPreferredName for official names, while isShortNames goes for the ones in common use (as in the English variants in the above example);
    3. add some isOfficial field (probably the least feasible, at this stage);
  • do not apply inversion in names for the purpose of sorting them, at the very least those variants shouldn't be set preferred (I have no good idea yet on how to prefer them in ad-hoc user interfaces).
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