RelatedTerms

Related Term (de: Verwandter Begriff)

• association relationship between terms, like synonym. A term can consist of one ore more words, like Lord's House.
• de: Assoziationsbeziehung zwischen Begriffen wie z.B. Synonym (ein Term kann aus mehreren Worten bestehen, wie z.B. Lord's house).

Quicklinks:

• Documentation: Related terms on OSM Wiki
• Project management: See Diskussion:RelatedTerms (german).

The Problem

We want to improve the searching for OSM tags. Currently, when looking in OSM wiki or Taginfo for the tag of a "chapel" (where the correct tag is "amenity=place_of_worship"), it's not found! A crucial point there is that synonyms and related terms have to be there.

Here are some examples of terms currently not found in OSM Wiki nor in Taginfo:

• chapel (en) => amenity=place_of_worship
• Fussgängerstreifen (de_CH) => ?
• Litfaßsäule (de_DE) => ?
• (please add yours...)

The Solution

In order to achieve an enhanced search, a controlled word list (a term list, a thesaurus) becomes necessary. This is a list of synonyms where most are OpenStreetMap specific. This information can not be found in a general purpose thesaurus. So, we propose that mappers capture so-called "related terms" (synonyms) in the OSM wiki. These related terms are fully part of the OSM wiki page and can be kept up to date by the community (where I would like to set a good example).

The Related Term Template

Mappers and Wiki authors can use the 'Template:RelatedTerm' (local: Template:RelatedTerm). See there for further instructions.

Look for example at 'Tag:amenity=place_of_worship' to see how this template is being used.

Here are some examples: {{RelatedTerm|castle}} {{RelatedTerm|villa}} {{RelatedTerm|ruin}} {{RelatedTerm|DE_ch|Schloss}} {{RelatedTerm|word1 word2}}

Discussion

Of course it would be more precise to introduce synonyms and broader/narrower terms instead of the multipurpose 'related term' (see Thesaurus and [1] on Wikipedia (en)). But that seems too complicated for many users.

Or you could hope there exists some "Google magic" which would collect and combine sources in order to find out the usage of tag. But that not going to happen - at least not so precise and effectiveness like the information the related terms provide.

How does it work? The related terms are parsed from the Wiki pages by TagFinder and stored in a SQLite database. TagFinder uses Taginfo API when looking at statistics.

Related Terms for programmers

Programmers can access related terms with RESTful webservices (HTTP GET with JSON response) to be defined and implemented yet.

• Taginfo API specification 'relatedterms'
• Taginfo API specification 'relatedterms'

Taginfo API-Dokumentation siehe Taginfo, Taginfo/API auf dem OSM Wiki und die API doc auf Taginfo.