War Diaries Talk

Places

  • Stork by Stork

    I'm sure you've all noticed the problem that sometimes you put a town into the Place box and it doesn't come up. I think I figured out why this happens. If you put Ecoivres into the Place box, it comes up. If you put Flamermont into the box, it doesn't come up. If you go to Google Maps and put in Flamermont, it comes up, just west of Ecoivres. Notice on Google maps that Ecoivres has a capital 'E' and the rest of the letters are in lower case, but Flamermont is in all caps. If you look around Google maps and put any other town name that is in all caps into the Place box, it doesn't come up. So, for some reason, the Place box doesn't recognize towns that are in all caps on Google Maps- it only recognizes towns with the first letter capitalized. Is this something that OWD can fix, or is it a problem with Google Maps?

    Does anyone know the reason Google has some towns in all caps and some with only the first letter capitalized?

    Posted

  • f0rbe5 by f0rbe5

    There is at least one more problem with GoogleEarth's locations. Saint-Ouen on the Somme does not come up when put in the box, but Saint-Ouen in Paris does. Saint-Ouen on the Somme does, of course, appear on Google's maps, but when you click on it, the details are for Saint-Ouen in northern Paris! I pointed this error out to Google last week, but I've no idea whether they will take action, or if so, in what timescale...

    Posted

  • Stork by Stork

    I may have the answer to my question in the last line of my original post- maybe the reason Google has some towns in all caps and some with only the first letter capitalized is population. Towns below a certain population are in all caps, and towns above it have just the first letter capitalized. Or maybe it's physical size- towns below a certain number of square miles or kms are all caps, towns above have the first letter capitalized. If you go to a spot on Google Maps which has several towns in all caps and several with the first letter capitalized, then click the zoom out button slowly, the all-caps towns disappear first, so they must be smaller size, either human or physical.

    Posted

  • cyngast by cyngast moderator in response to Stork's comment.

    I think you're on the right track thinking it has to do with population, but I think it also has to do with which towns are the official government-recognized towns and which are simply areas within the larger town's boundaries. To go back to your example, on the Google Maps page (not our place tag, but the actual Google Maps page) if you click on Flamermont, you'll see in the box on the left side of the page that it says "Flamermont, Flers, France." (At least that's what I get in the US. I'm assuming you'll see the same or something similar in other countries.) Flers is just to the west of Flamermont. If you click on it, you should get a red line that indicates the official borders of Flers with Flamermont inside that line.

    So, yes, I think the towns with only the initial letter in upper case are the larger ones, which would likely also be the official name for that area.

    Does this make sense?

    I don't know if what we see in our Place tag is dictated by Google Maps or if it is a result of settings put in to the project at the beginning. And if it is the latter, I don't know if it can be changed at this point. It seems to recognize only the official town names and not the smaller areas within them. When there are more than one town with the same name, I'm guessing that they are ranked in the dropdown list in the tag either by size or frequency of searches for them.

    I can ask Rob about this, but I don't expect him to be available for a week or two.

    Posted

  • cyngast by cyngast moderator in response to f0rbe5's comment.

    I see what you mean. I just searched for Saint-Ouen and it shows only the one near Paris. I suspect that the results on the list of suggestions are determined by the frequency of searches for various places.

    I also tried Saint-Ouen Somme and although there was still nothing in the dropdown list, when I hit Enter it took me to the Saint-Ouen near Flixecourt. Some of the places we hunt for are so small or out-of-the-way that they don't rank very high on searches. If you don't get what you want when you search, try adding another detail, as I did with adding Somme.

    Posted

  • marie.eklidvirginmedia.com by marie.eklidvirginmedia.com

    I find this is useful for searching for place names and even people in the war diaries.

    For example see page link: https://talk.operationwardiary.org/#/subjects/AWD00040kd

    Previous persons comment: “There is no town of La Kreule, but there is a La Kreule Military Cemetery north of Hazebrouck”.

    I replied “: La Kreule is a small hamlet 2 kilometres north of Hazebrouck, on the road to St Sylvestre-Cappel and Steenvoorde.

    I found this out by doing a Google search: Typing in - La Kreule WW1 - and the answer came up. Anytime I have a query regarding places and even people in a certain Battalions/Regiment etc, I just do a Google search like this one.

    Posted

  • cyngast by cyngast moderator

    You can find many of the places where the troops were by simply typing the name into the search bar on Google Maps (not the place tag). This works not just with towns but also with some of the farms where they were, as long as the diary author used the French name for it. Many of the military cemeteries were once farms that were taken over as casualty clearing stations; if you find a cemetery under that name, you have probably found the place.

    And if Google Maps doesn't lead anywhere, try searching with Google or another search engine.

    By the way, if a diary calls a place a farm, such as Rossignol Farm, you can also try searching for Ferme de Rossignol, or Ferme de la ... or Ferme du ...These are all variations of The Farm of ..., which is the typical French sentence structure.

    Posted

  • Stork by Stork

    If Rob is back, I'm still wondering if the Place box can be changed like I described in my original post...

    Posted

  • ral104 by ral104 moderator, scientist

    I doubt it, I'm afraid - there's no list of places coded into OWD itself, we use an external gazetteer to look them up. I can't remember the exact details, but I'll find out. Although changing OWD itself won't make any difference, it may be possible to submit changes to the gazetteer directly.

    Posted

  • eatyourgreens by eatyourgreens moderator, admin

    Hi,

    OWD uses geonames.org to look up place names, restricting the search to France, Belgium and England. Google Maps is used to display those locations, but not to look them up.

    And geonames doesn't know about Flamermont: http://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=Flamermont&country=FR

    Posted

  • cyngast by cyngast moderator in response to eatyourgreens's comment.

    Thanks for this bit of information. Nice to know how this works.

    Posted