Hi,
for a side project, I had to look up official websites for as much cities as possible.
I also looked up the cities for your country and am attaching the CSV file to this message. Using a script to upload the websites automated was too complex or out of my comfort zone. If someone else would be interested in enriching the metadata for these cities - feel free to do so.
You can find the file for the processed countries (including yours) here:
tldr; Check if Wikipedia has a website in the sidebox of the city page (English version), otherwise check if the obvious candidates exist. I removed domains owned by a known domain squatter or that don’t resolve. If the domain name is too generic, have a quick look at the site first to validate that it’s actually the city site.
If there is no interest, feel free to just ignore this post. I had to look them up anyway and thought it made sense to share them here.
I can tell for sure that for Greece the 15 websites that are contained in the list, have nothing to do with the municipalities (maybe 2 of them are fine).
I understand that you made the search based on “city” and not based on “municipality”, which as I’ve explained in your other topic about this mini-project, the concept of municipality is different per country (some have the same or almost the same), which is why it will provide incorrect results in some lists you provide.
You do well of course for providing those lists here and asking the local communities to verify and update the OSM-data if necessary.
For Ireland there are far more misses than hits unfortunately. Most of the links are to train stations on the Irish Rail website, and the link for Trim is to a castle rather the town. Also some places are listed under both Irish and English names, and one town is listed 3 times (Muinebeag, Muine Bheag, Bagenalstown).
Unfortunately, that’s not much use as it stands. Perhaps you should go through the data and do some basic QA and then represent it?
For rhe UK, the .gov.uk sites will mostly be correct for somewhere - but the others will need checking to see that even if they were correct once, they still are updated and still a valid admin unit.
Also - are these the website of the place or e.g. the parish council? Often in the UK these are different concepts. Wikipedia gets this wrong, and so is no help.
Other example problems include that your website for St Ives is obviously for the wrong St Ives (by lat and long). There are (and you have) several Prestons - but which website is which?
Adding to my earlier post about Ireland - a more fundamental question is what kind of “official website” you would expect to find for most of the places in this list. It seems like you may be thinking of cities with some form of local government - but Ireland has very few cities in that sense. Most local government is by county councils that cover both towns and rural areas, usually corresponding to place=county in OSM. I would expect most counties to have a website, but not most towns.
I’m not sure where the starting point for this list is, but it does not cover the counties and includes mainly towns, so it is not surprising you were not able to find many websites.
Couldn’t you just get the place objects from OSM using an Overpass query or API call? All place objects with values like city or town could be a first start.
Wikipedia currently lists 2057 cities for Germany. In OSM there are 2290place=town for Germany, and another 99place=city.
Meanwhile, I took a look at the Austrian evaluation and looked at a few samples in my area. A website was found for Bregenz (line 15), but not for Feldkirch (line 14), although the schema name.at would be correct for both. Feldkirch even has a website on Wikipedia.
Another prominent example is Linz (line 4), which has the simple domain linz.at. This should also work like for bregenz.at. What could possibly go wrong here?
As far as I understand it, you compare the data with OSM anyway, is that correct? If so, wouldn’t it be more practical for you to store the OSM ID in the table?
In theory, you could then create a MapRoulette challenge as a tag-fix challenge, for example, and add the individual URLs after manual inspection into OSM.
I see potential in this collection because a municipality’s website can provide further information and being able to access it directly from OSM can be helpful for users and mappers equally.
If I can offer you any support in the form of research or information on German, Austrian or Swiss (+Liechtenstein) domains, please let me know!
Hi,
thanks for your feedback - I indeed have no clue of how municipalities are structured in different countries. I looked up Ireland and found (and integrated) this source:
From what I understand, these are essentially the autonomous entities. I reduced my list to these 31, choosing quality over quantity.
Thanks for your answer. And I completely agree that I’m painfully ignorant (and have been learning about the complexity of it). For my start, I picked the list of cities or units that were listed on wikipedia pages for that country. Sometimes these were overly detailed (e.g. UK), elsewhere they were too scarse (only listing the XX biggest cities in the country). Gradually trying to
Maybe it’s a stupid criterion, but I thought of the smallest unit that gets elected by the people and is in control of local legislation. Ideally, I would like to take the list that a country supplies itself - but that isn’t always easy to find. For my personal project, the most relevant part would be: the level deciding what IT infrastructure they use, but I can imagine that’s a REALLY arbitrary criterion.
That’s actually the first thing I tried, but the countries I tried it on, gave really bad results. (I even downloaded the full dump of Europe to not have the load on OSM online)
I’ll try looking into Austria and I found a list on German official statistics site listing population per city. I took that one for starters.
I would really be grateful if you could further help me with Germany, Austria, Switzerland (+ Liechtenstein). Some countries have subdomains (e.g. gov.uk or .kommune.no) and that helped a lot.
I indeed narrowed down the list of UK cities based on this list:
Much smaller list, but it’s official and well documented. I manually vetted the domains - choosing quality over quantity.
Given I am researching mail servers - smaller political units are equally important as it’s astonishing how many governing bodies actually have people using a gmail address. But I’ve learned that that’s way out of my depth and I’ll see how I can grow that part slower (and more in depth with better understanding)
Maybe wikidata is a better source for this information. I just asked perplexity.ai to write a wikidata query for all the cities in germany and their websites and this is what I got:
SELECT ?city ?cityLabel ?website
WHERE {
?city wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q515; # Instance of city or subclass of city
wdt:P17 wd:Q183; # Country: Germany
wdt:P856 ?website. # Official website
SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],de". }
}
ORDER BY ?cityLabel
In Hungary, due to the official regulation of the .HU domain it is with extremely high probability that the <settlement name>.hu name is the official name of the settlement, if exists. (There are about five exceptions or so, mainly due to registrations before the rule.)
