This document aims to describe the process of EqualStreetNames. Many of the examples describe here are based on Brussels, but can be applied to any other city.
- Get all the streets in a city from OpenStreetMap
- Use the
name:etymology:wikidatatag to query the information about the person mentionned in the streetname - Use the data from Wikidata to determine the gender (and more) of the person
The process defined here above assumes that we have all the streets of our city in OpenStreetMap and that all the streets of our city in OpenStreetMap have a name:etymology:wikidata tag if the streetname mentions a person.
First it's important to make sure we have all the streets of our city in OpenStreetMap. In the case of Brussels the streets listing from OpenStreetMap was compared to the streets listing from UrbIS (official data from the Brussels Region).
Alternatives for other regions can be the Flemish Wegenregister, the Wallonian PICC, the Dutch NWB, or any official government source.
A few streets were missing and manually added to OpenStreetMap.
At the beginning of the project (February 2019), around 5% of the streets of Brussels in OpenStreetMap had a name:etymology:wikidata tag.
Of course, not all the streets refer to a person (or an entity) and thus need a name:etymology:wikidata tag.
To link all the streets that refer to a person to the equivalent Wikidata item, we organized an event were we asked 100 people to manually find the Wikidata item (or the Wikipedia page) about the person from the streetname.
To avoid any issue and to simplify the workflow, the 100 people didn't edit Wikipedia, Wikidata, or OpenStreetMap.
The result of their work has been tagged manually in OpenStreetMap by OpenStreetMap Belgium volunteers.
If there is a name:etymology:wikidata tag in OpenStreetMap, the process follow that identifier to query that item from Wikidata.
We consider to be a person, the Wikidata items that are "instance of" (property P31):
In the Wikidata object, the sex or gender is defined by the property P21.