Postal codes as alternate names
Ryan
alternate names for most cities (France/Spain). This seems wrong to
me, even if they are given "post" language identifiers. Postal codes,
if they are integrated, should be a separate feature class since there
is rarely a 1:1 postal:city pairing.
Marc Wick
At the moment we don't have enough information about postal codes to add
them as separate feature class.
Marc
Ryan Levering
I'd love to see them integrated in the data. However, I have a
semantic and practical problem with doing it via alternate names:
Semantic - postal codes and cities, at least in most countries that I
know of, don't have a 1:1 mapping with cities and generally have
fairly different boundaries. To say that a postal code is an
alternate name of a city is just wrong. The city is not defined by
it's zip code nor is it used in common language as an identifier for
the city.
Practical - I have an address parser that uses geonames data. I have
to filter out these postal alternate names or the parser gets very
confused at why there are two cities, possibly conflicting, in the
same address.
Is the eventual plan to add them as separate feature classes? What
information are you lacking?
Bernard Vatant
Completely tuned with Ryan on this, I have to cope those days with data
where places (in france) are "identified" by Name + Postal code, that
have to be attached to cities identified by insee codes or geonames id
(we have the mapping). What happens in France is roughly as following
- Big cities have several postal codes.
- Some small-to-middle cities can be uniquely identified by a single
postal code.
- Many small villages share a postal code with their neighbours and a
local city.
Only in the second case the use of postal code as alternate name can
make sense, but I agree it should be stored in a specific field.
Bernard
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Marc Wick
Do you have concrete examples where it does not work? For Paris as far
as I know each postal codes also has a proper name and if it is only the
number of the Arrondissement. (Ex 75013= 13e Arrondissement,13eme
Arr,13ème Arr,Arrondissement des Gobelins,Gobelins,Paris 13e,XIIIe)
In the third case where several villages share the same postal code the
code is just added to each of the villages sharing the code.