Strange place names in Android widget
-
@idefix37 said in Strange place names in Android widget:
GPS option is useful if you are travelling, but I prefer to use one of my Favorites as starting page (then it save the battery if you don’t use the GPS of your mobile)
Well, yes, that's probably what I'll end up doing while in town. But I do travel a fair bit, so I'll end up using the GPS. Oh, well, it does not matter so much if the name is a bit odd, as long as the forecast is good :-)
Yet as you say, this suggests that the name database is a bit odd... where is it coming from, OSM ?
-
@jfmoyen
Yes, Windy uses Open Street Maps as database:
https://community.windy.com/topic/4649/how-to-correct-errors-in-the-base-maps
-
@idefix37 said in Strange place names in Android widget:
Yes, Windy uses Open Street Maps as database:
https://community.windy.com/topic/4649/how-to-correct-errors-in-the-base-mapsWell... OSM normally has sensible place names... although I suppose it depends on which OSM "layer" (or tag) is actually used, of course.
-
Further investigation reveals that all the names I have seen correspond to places that have place = isolated_dwelling tag in OSM, and of course a name=XXX tag.
Something like place=city|town|village would be more useful, I think... ;-)Another oddity is that in at least one case, the place name displayed is not the closest place=isolated_dwelling. There are closer places having this tag. So, there must me something I have missed... It may have to do with the details of how Windy connects to OSM (directly to the OSM database, or through some sort of intermediate export...)
-
This should interest Windy developers
-
@idefix37 said in Strange place names in Android widget:
This should interest Windy developers
Well that's why I report it. Should I post it somewhere else ?
-
@jfmoyen @idefix37 Thank you both for your great help. We are working on fix, but it will probably take us some time. We are currently working on a huge refactor around georeverse searching and also geo searching. This bug can be fixed after realeasing these changes. Thank you again for your help and understanding.
-
You're welcome, keep up the good job :-)
-
I think I can confirm that the place name displayed is the closest place = isolated_dwelling. In the past day or two, the place name displayed has fluctuated beween 2 or three names, each corresponding to one isolated dwelling, and each roughly equidistant from where I'm sitting.
However, having played a bit with QGIS and Voronoi polygons, it appears to be a bit more complex. Apparently, the name displayed is never exactly the name of the closest place. Looks like either my position is incorrect (by > 100 m, which i think is unlikely), or the position of the places is wrong (could happen with projection errors?). Or some of the places are not considered, for some reason (the database used is a weird subset of OSM - we know it is weird anyway as it is ignoring villages and towns in favour of isolated dwellings...).
-
And a last one - travelling on Southern France yesterday, the place names displayed were much more reasonable (villages, I think). It would appear that the issue resides with the database used (OSM extract...), that is somehow poorly tagged specifically in certain parts of the country...
-
Reviving an old thread: in the last few days (sorry I cannot be more specific), the place names have changed to something more sensible: either the name of the city, or of the suburb in which I actually am. Much better. So if the dev changed something.... well, it was the right thing to change!! 😁
-
@jfmoyen You are right. By the way, we are still "changing something" on our application :-) That is great our change helped you.
