GIS

The previous post, on translating place names with Wikidata, was about how much you have to pay for trustworthy translations when no official map data exists. This post is the opposite case: Taiwan has complete, free, regularly updated official map data, so the processing can be simple to the point of being boring, and that is the best thing about it. This post doubles as a full walkthrough of one handler. The pipeline post covered the fixed extract pipeline and the per-country insertion points. Here we look at what Taiwan actually puts into those slots.

The first two posts covered the mechanism and the pipeline: Immich reads place names from cities500.txt, and that file is produced from national mapping data by extract and release. Technically, “how to swap the data” is a settled question. The genuinely hard part is something else: what should a foreign place name look like so that it reads naturally to a Taiwanese user? immich-geodata-zh-tw currently handles five regions, and it gives five different answers. This post is about the criterion behind those answers.