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A comment on Show HN: Free database of geographic place names and geospatial data. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: Free database of geographic place names and geos... by bhaak on Friday September 25, 2015 @06:28AM (#10277267)
There's definitely something wrong.

Looking at the SQL file, "Zürich" is listed as "Zdrich", Munich is only shown as "Munich" without the German name "München" anywhere, and Cologne is listed as "Cologne" with the wrong "Koln" as alternative name.

Doesn't look like a reliable data source.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: Free database of geographic place names and geos... by seszett on Friday September 25, 2015 @06:40AM (#10277313)
French names have the same problem, with "La Réunion" being shown as "La Rcunion" and "Rhône-Alpes" as "RhAne-Alpes".

It's strange, I can't really understand how these accents can get mangled as these particular single letters.

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Re:Show HN: Free database of geographic place names and geos... by vcarl on Friday September 25, 2015 @09:31AM (#10278007)
Almost looks like OCR errors, especially Rhône -> RhAne.
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Re:Show HN: Free database of geographic place names and geos... by bhaak on Friday September 25, 2015 @09:48AM (#10278087)
I don't think that the reason are OCR errors. It's too consistent for that.

I think I also have seen such character set corruptions before, but I can't remember how exactly you can get these particular corruptions.

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Re:Show HN: Free database of geographic place names and geos... by marco1 on Friday September 25, 2015 @06:19PM (#10281058)
They're not OCR errors, unfortunately. Sorry for these problems! We have to investigate!
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Re:Show HN: Free database of geographic place names and geos... by maze-le on Friday September 25, 2015 @06:44AM (#10277341)
It's 2015 and we still have UTF-8 problems... sigh
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Re:Show HN: Free database of geographic place names and geos... by spacemanmatt on Friday September 25, 2015 @10:07AM (#10278200)
Or this is just a sloppy translation/compilation from better sources.
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Re:Show HN: Free database of geographic place names and geos... by marco1 on Friday September 25, 2015 @06:18PM (#10281056)
Sorry for the inaccuracies!

We'd love to fix all those issues -- maybe with some help from the community :)

The goal is definitely to turn this into a more and more reliable data source every day.

[ Parent | on HN ]