Mapping Hacks

393

Chapter 7

CHAPTER SEVEN

Names and Places

Hacks 78–86

It is not down in any map; true places never are.

—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Apparently, human beings are pretty bad at naming things; sometimes we

can’t even agree how to agree that we’re talking about the same object.

However, we’re quite good at filtering differences and recognizing identi-

ties: “Avenue,” “Av,” “Ave,” and “Ave.” are all apparently the same street

suffix.

There are strategies for naming places to help humans and machines com-

pensate for each others’ weaknesses and provide practical assistance to one

another. There are many standard code systems in the world, which unam-

biguously map a place to a location identified by the code. In the United

States, the ZIP and ZIP+4 postal codes allow us to do good-enough, near-

enough geolocation. Most countries have a postal code that identifies spe-

cific areas at some level of resolution.

For identifying countries and connecting regions and towns to them, there

are the U.S. FIPS codes and the two- and three-letter ISO codes, which allow

us to take different spellings, or different versions of country names, and

unambiguously identify the same “place” being talked about.

Sadly, not many countries have the open geographic data policy maintained

by the U.S. Census Bureau and Geological Survey, so a lot of world-map-

ping resources described in this chapter are dependent on data provided ...