[mkgmap-dev] Address & city country name assignment.

Wed Feb 16 13:28:31 GMT 2011

[This is not particularly in reply to Dermot.]

First off, congratulations on the progress that you've been making with respect to search.

My suggestion would be to move region (country, city) detection into a preprocessing step, outside of mkgmap. That is, some other tool preprocesses and normalizes the osm data and assigns consistent is_in tags. Then mkgmap looks only at the is_in tags.

The same approach could be used for coast line and multipolygon handling: A preprocessor would fix up or delete broken multipolygons and standardize tagging (on outer way, on the relation, etc.)

Ideally, there'd be planet dumps and extracts or a read-only API that delivered such normalized data, as this would be useful to most consumers of OSM data.

Other things that could be done:
- Normalize footway/cycleway/path.
- Assign maxspeed tags based on inside/outside built up area.
- ...

I realize this is quite far away, and going just part of the way would make mkgmap harder to use (need to run a bunch of tools on the extract before compiling the map). So I'm not saying anyone should do this, just trying to suggest an alternative approach.

Cheers
Robert