[uf-new] Re: Exposing place names whose property type (street-adr, locality...) is unknown

[JMesserly]

Brian, thank you for your advice.  You suggested:
>--- i would use extended-address for something like "Bailie's Bar" it
>is not the street-address, and it is not the locality, but it is
>useful. Infact, i probably would work in ORG and FN if this were an
>hCard.
Of course I wouldn't have posted the inquiry to this list if I had the
type of this information.  But the user has not declared it- Wikipedia
authors may eventually get around to such things, but in large numbers
of cases, there is no location information explicitly declared.  In
cases where it is, they declare Location as one long string, and they
move on.  My plan is to do Bot runs to examine these location values
and provisionally declare the types, for later correction by
subsequent editing by contributors.  In those cases, it will be
trivial mapping to the relevant hcard/hcalendar fields.  My question
concerns the unknown types, and what I hear people saying is that it
would be ok to expose them in the locality field with the
understanding that we try to motivate contributors to refine the data
with explicitly typed address information.

>>  Red alert? case two:
>>  <div class="adr">
>>    <span class="locality">Teal street</span>,
>>    <span class="locality">Honolulu</span>
>>  </div>
>>  (real case- see
>>  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pearl_harbor_attack_Japanese_recon_photo_of_battleship_row_80G30552.jpg)

>--- I am not sure what "Teal street" is, is it a street name without
>an address? If so, then you should use street-address, if it is not
>(it is some colloquial name), then you should probably use
>extended-address.
It's a street name, visible in the Pearl harbor bombing run photo that
the link points to.  No street number available.  Using the
provisional implementation mentioned above, after the author coded it,
the template would expose "Teal St." in the locality property.  In a
subsequent Bot pass, Teal St. would be identified with a type that
would allow the template to expose it in a street-address property
(assuming that is the correct type for a street name without a street
number).

>>  It gets worse.  In some cases there are real addresses with street numbers.

>--- If they are real addresses, with real street numbers, what is
>wrong with 'street-address'? If you have the precision to the street
>and house number, then what is the dissonance with the ADR structure?
Wikipedia and Commons are not a structured databases, and although we
can make templates that require such declarations, the contributors
are volunteers and generally shun bothering with formal declarations.
So we don't know the types of these strings.  A bot can guess at them,
but in some cases it will be impossible to figure out. For example, on
page http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-11500-0030,_Berlin-Treptow,_sowjetisches_Ehrenmal.jpg
the template exposes Sowjetisches Ehrenmal as a string.  If you use
Operator to click Google maps, you will find that it correctly
associates this feature as most relevant to "Treptower park".  No way
will a bot ever figure whether these are neighborhoods, squares, or
landmarks.   For instances where the bot can't make a good guess, is
it ok to leave this ambiguous information in the locality property
until such time as a contributor declares its type?

If so, then I can code it up that way and run some bot passes so we
can do a volume test of a couple hundred (later thousands) of pages in
this form.  Naturally, such processing can be reversed so we can back
out if your community wants to modify this guidance.

Thanks for everyone's time considering this matter.

John JMesserly