NamedAfter

The goal of this project is to give users information why map features has their name. As opposed to Key:Wikipedia, the features might have no real connection to the linked objects.

see Key:name:etymology:wikidata for a more OSM friendly implementation.

Examples

• street named "Bratislava street" would link to city of Bratislava (even though the street itself is in different city)
• "Johann Sebastian Bach street" would link to this author (even though he might have never been at this place)
• "29th August street" would link the memorial day

Realisation

Parsing street names and linking them to wikipedia articles. Simple web map interface.

For small areas and languages a bruteforce approach should work. Downloading a OSM country extract in a DB, downloading wikipedia extract to a DB. Checking for each street name if it has a similarly named wikipedia article which is a person (or the other way around).

Maybe use tag like "wikipedianamedafter:lang=..." on OSM elements

Problems

• two very big databases
• many languages
• inflection of words in many languages
• ambiguous names ("Bach street" versus many Bachs in wikipedia)
• many names for one articles (streets "SNP", "Slovenského národného povstania" and "29th august" should link to SNP, see for all different street names)
• some streets have too historical names ("Shopping street", "Hat street") or too simple names ("Narrow street", "Short street", "Main square") which probably do not deserve this popup
• false positives (eg a street and a city being named after the same thing, but the city is dominant in wikipedia)
• ...

Typical elements

• streets
• squares
• bridges
• maybe monuments

Named after

• people
• other geographical elements
• historical events

See also

• existing discussion in Key:wikipedia about "Linking to related subjects"
• first draft in Slovak for Slovak streets, another example
• EqualStreetNames