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  • AvatarGrimpel
    20th November 2013 at 11:41 am #1703

    Hi everybody!
    I would like to guide my users to enter places orderly. As I understand autocomplete on places searches only the genealogical database. Optional GeoNames, too. (GeoNames doesn’t work well on german places…)
    In my point of view it would make more sense to search the google maps (wt-)database. (There I could easily import proper hierarchical place names and coords.)
    Did I miss a configuration option or is this just not implented?
    Toodle-oo! Grimpel

  • kiwikiwi
    20th November 2013 at 3:36 pm #1712

    No, you didn’t miss anything. It is a question asked a few times before, with a complex answer.

    While I don’t entirely disagree with your expectation, there are reasons why autocomplete is only linked to the GEDCOM PLAC data (wt_places table) not the Google Maps data (wt_placelocations).

    1. Not everyone use the Google Maps module, so at the very least the code would need to identify that.
    2. Among those who have it enabled, many still don’t really use it, so have many places missing.
    3. The GEDCOM data is specific to a single family tree, but the GM table is site-wide. It has no tree identifier attached. So a single place might have multiple different spellings, depending on the tree it came from. That could be very confusing for users.
    4. The GM module is secondary to the GEDCOM data. The GEDCOM should be correct first, then the GM data can be created properly to match and supply coordinates.

    I’m sure some of these points could be changed (fixed), but it was always planned that the entire place-handling code would be re-written, though little progress was ever made. It is a VERY complex area.

    Nigel
    My personal kiwitrees site is www.our-families.info
  • AvatarGrimpel
    21st November 2013 at 2:57 pm #1733

    Thank you Nigel for your answer.
    Hmm… I see the complexity (historical place names, translation, defining of areas using coords …) and I haven’t seen a convincing approach at all. In my point of view geotagging entrapped many genealogists to deform their place data by “normalizing”.
    As a newbie it’s sometimes hard to figure out if something is not working well because of my ignorance or a half-baked module 🙂

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