How to get a City name to affect an entire suburb?

General talk
1

Hi all,

First time poster…

We are trying to map locations in the Marietta, Georgia suburb of West Hampton. According to Google Maps and the Zip Code lookup the area is officially part of Marietta, but if you search OpenStreetMap you can only find streets and addresses by using West Hampton GA instead of Marietta GA.

The area is outside of Marietta’s administrative boundary set up in OSM, but that same boundary shows on Google Maps without a lookup issue outside of it.

Since I cannot search for “West Hampton GA” in Google Maps I’m wondering if I should just delete that Hamlet from OSM…would the area just “fall into” Marietta’s purview then? Or do I need to extend Marietta’s administrative boundary? That boundary was imported from TIGER so I’m loathe to do that, plus I’m not sure how to do that because it’s so big.

Or is there another way to do this? I tried adding an is_in:city of “Marietta” to West Hampton’s node, as well as adding Marietta to its general is_in value, but it’s not having any effect.

Thank you for your attention,

Jim Allison
Development Project Lead
SpeedLine Solutions Inc.

2

Have a look at the link you gave about the OSM boundary relation for Marietta, and also at the boundary display of openmapsurfer:

http://openmapsurfer.uni-hd.de/?zoom=13&lat=33.93409&lon=-84.50472&layers=00B0000FTFF
Currently the boundary relation is NOT a closed line string collection … there are gaps!

So if you use http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org for adress lookup, it will work better with closed complete boundary relations.

To get some repait or other hints I would recommend you to write in the US subforum here or at the USA-OSM mailinglist … see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mailing_lists

Because I am quite sure that some US mappers are better familiar with the imported TIGER data and they will better know how to fix your issue.

3

Thanks Stephan. I noticed the broken boundary, but even if I was to “close it off”, West Hampton is outside of it. I will ask in the US forum.

Never saw OpenMapSurfer before…very helpful!

Jim Allison
Development Project Lead
SpeedLine Solutions Inc.

4

West Hampton probably should not be tagged as place=hamlet. That is for settlements with just a few houses, away from any city/town etc. If it is a suburb as you say, then it should be tagged as place=suburb (or place=neighbourhood).
This place tagging may affect how addresses are calculated by Nominatim.

5

I’ve set West Hampton as a suburb and it’s showing up as suburb instead of hamlet now when I search for it, but I still can’t find the streets in that suburb under Marietta. It’s looking more and more like I will have to surround the neighborhood with Marietta’s admin border.

Jim Allison
Development Project Lead
SpeedLine Solutions Inc.

6

Well, I tried this and the new admin boundary shows up around West Hampton, but it’s still not searchable as part of Marietta. I’m wondering if this is the problem:

http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/details.php?place_id=97281310

It indicates that Marietta is not a parent of West Hampton…does anyone know how to specify this relationship in OSM?

Thanks,
Jim Allison
Development Project Lead
SpeedLine Solutions, Inc.

7

After doing changes to the OSM main database, are you sure that the Nominatim database is in sync already?

I dont’t know how that lag is in these days, but maybe it takes some time to get boundary changes into nominatim.

8

According to the lag stats it was behind by a couple hours last night, but it’s been overnight and it’s still not working :confused:

Jim Allison
Development Project Lead
SpeedLine Solutions, Inc.

9

That boundary is definitly broken. It should contain ways forming a closed area (like a Multipolygon).

i.e. a city is a “child” of a country simply by being inside it (and having a higher admin_level=*), nothing complicated :wink:

10

Well, I think I properly closed the West Hampton-surrounded Marietta polygon on Friday before I left, but it’s still not working.

Thanks,
Jim Allison
Development Project Lead
SpeedLine Solutions, Inc.

11

Ultimately I believe the damaged admin boundary is the cause of this, but fixing it is beyond our ability; it’s a horrible mess.

In the end we selected the entire area (Ctrl-click-drag) and set addr:city=Marietta on all objects within the West Hampton area. On a spot check most did not have an addr:city value so we weren’t overwriting much. Now it works.

Thanks to all for the suggestions.

12

So you have edited all objects within this rectangle and added addr:city=Marietta even to normal ways, or edited addr:city=XXXX to addr:city=Marietta if it had another value ???

Are you really sure that this kind of editing OSM data is good practice?? Only because of a difficult boundary line, and only because a geocoder like Nominatim does not output desired results???

and please be aware that addr:xxx tags DON’T belong to ways that are highways … only POIs and buildings.

I fear we have to validate your edits.

13

Should I have used is_in:Marietta on all the streets (except highways) instead?

14

Well, the is_in tag is at least better than addr:city when tagged on ways, but is_in is also deprecated yet, see the OSM wiki.

but the best solution would really be to find the real boundary line than encloses the administartive area of Marietta or each suburb or place next to it.

So is there no opendata or similar to find the administartive boundaries for cities in the US?
How is this issue handeled on other cities or suburbs there?

15

The Marietta boundaries are on their web site.

West Hampton is outside of that boundary, yet when I look up the zip code for a location in West Hampton it tells me it’s part of Marietta.

16

I am not sure whether we are allowed to use the boundary from that official website … was even not able to inspect it there due to the need of Silverlight.

Because I am not so familiar with administrative boundaries and postalcodes in the USA, I really would recommend to ask this whole topic on the OSM-US mailinglist.

I bet that there are some areas in the whole USA where conditions in rela world about suburbs and boundaries are similar to Marietta / West Hampton … and there is a way to find a solution how to map all necessary web elements from real world into OSM database.