 This week in #geoweirdness rather than focusing on a specific county or territory we thought we'd post a bit about confusing places in general. These come up a lot in geocoding. What exactly do we mean? People often have a perception of a place that doesnโt match the true geographic reality. Hereโs a basic example, saying "the United States" ๐บ๐ธ but meaning only the contiguous US 1/n 13 comments
3/ But what many people donโt realize is this same confusion often exists for small jurisdictions. An example is the ๐ฉ๐ช German city of Hamburg, which technically includes a few islands in the North Sea @opencage Honolulu ๐บ๐ธ and Tokyo ๐ฏ๐ต are also good examples of this. 4/ As an aside, Hamburg (which, confusingly for non-German speakers is abbreviated as "HH" for "Hansestadt Hamburg") is confusingly both a German city and a state (as are Berlin and Bremen). This often leads to funny-looking address formatting when ๐บ๐ธ American companies apply their formatting to ๐ฉ๐ช German addresses. We call it the โBerlin, Berlinโ bug. See our guide: https://opencagedata.com/guides/formatting-addresses 5/ Another famous confusing place example is Tokyo, capital of Japan ๐ฏ๐ต, which includes some remote Pacific islands 6/ A common mistake with places like this is to return the true geographic center point, which doesnโt match expectations at all. OpenStreetMap solves this by setting tags like "admin_centre" https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relation:boundary#Relation_members 8/ Another point of confusion is placenames that everyone knows and uses, but that have no official basis. For example, tell anyone in London ๐ฌ๐ง to meet you for dinner in Chinatown, and they know exactly where you mean. But it is not an "official" placename in any sense. But that's a topic for another thread 9/ All of this weirdness is the โsalt in the soupโ (as we say in German) that makes geo interesting, though at times it can also make it very difficult for a geocoder to give the answer people expect (rather than the technically correct answer). What's your favorite example? 10/ Thanks for reading (and sharing). Let us know your favorite examples of #geoweirdness. We have more threads about specific countries, border disputes, geocoding, etc on our blog. Some still on twitter, but week by week we are moving them to mastodon (and writing new threads)  |
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2/ One of the best โconfusingโ countries is France ๐ซ๐ท.
Many peopleโs perception of France is just European or โMetropolitanโ France. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_France
But France is much more than that, as covered in our thread back in February: https://en.osm.town/@opencage/109930044904649272
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