simhacker/moollm/place

place — a subject with a location on Earth

Read [`GLANCE.yml`](GLANCE.yml) then [`CARD.yml`](CARD.yml) first. This is the protocol: how a place is keyed, how competing claims are held, and what may leave the repo.

room knows what is inside it and which way is out. place knows where it is. Almost everything on a map inherits both, and the combination is the normal case:

inherits: [coffeeshop, room, place]   # a shop you can enter, at a tolerated address
inherits: [room, place]               # the same building after the shop closed
inherits: [place]                      # a bench, a bridge, a mural, a tour stop

Collisions resolve left to right, so ordering is how you say what a thing mostly is.

Article 1: the address is the subject

Key on the address. Never on the name.

A name-keyed row forks the moment a shop rebrands, lies the moment it moves, and orphans itself the moment it closes. An address-keyed record absorbs all three as ordinary edits: the trading name is a tenancy, and a rebrand appends one. The bonus is the question that name-keyed data can never answer -- what used to be here -- which falls out for free, because former tenants are earlier entries in the same list.

Amsterdam makes this literal. The burgemeester tolerates cannabis sales at addresses, not at businesses; the shop is what is currently standing on a tolerated spot.

The id is a slug: oudezijds-voorburgwal-88h. It never changes, even when everything inside it does.

Article 2: matching addresses is the whole game, and Dutch fights back

One street, five spellings. 1e Const. Huygensstraat is EERSTE CONSTANTIJN HUYGENSSTRAAT. Normalize before comparing: fold case and diacritics, expand abbreviations, map ordinals onto digits (eerste, 1ste, 1 → 1e).

Exclude the huisletter from the key. The roster says Amstel 8 H, a directory says Amstel 8, and a shopfront says neither. Matching on street plus number and reporting the suffix disagreement finds the shop; matching on the full triple silently loses it. The disagreement is worth keeping -- it is often the tell for a renumbered building.

House-number ranges (88-90) keep the low end and note the range. Which brings us to:

Orphan pairs. When an authority lists a number nobody uses and a directory names a number the authority does not list, on the same street, a few doors apart, that is almost always one place wearing two numbers -- not two problems. Pair them and put one look at the door on the list. Amsterdam's Bulldog sits at 88 or 90 depending on who you ask.

Article 3: coordinates are claims, and averaging them is a lie

A place collects coordinates: a government geocoder, a directory, OSM, and the GPS in your pocket when you stood at the door. They disagree, sometimes by a whole building.

coordinates:
  preferred: { lat: 52.3744626, lng: 4.8813694, source: field-survey }
  spread_m: 63           # two sources point at different buildings; the pair is the story
  claims:
    - { lat: 52.3744626, lng: 4.8813694, source: field-survey, observed: 2026-09-20 }
    - { lat: 52.3739900, lng: 4.8809100, source: cannamaps,    observed: 2026-09-15 }

Never write the mean. It is a point nobody asserted, it is usually in the canal, and it destroys the only signal that says go look. Choose by documented source preference, publish the spread, and let a high spread sort itself to the top of the review queue.

Article 4: every source carries a license, and one field has teeth

sources.yml holds each source's license and one boolean, osm_ok. A build step refuses to put a claim into the upload set unless its source says true.

This is why the bike ride is not merely nicer than desk research. A field survey is the only evidence that is both current and unambiguously yours to upload. Everything else is a lead telling you where to point the camera.

Article 5: two kinds of past, never one column

A former trading name and a former use of the building are different pasts:

tenancies:                  # who SOLD here
  - { name: "Mellow Yellow", until: 2016-12-31, cause: school-distance }
site_history:               # what the BUILDING was
  - what: "a used-horse depot, whose owner invented a crane for lifting horses out of the canal"
    confidence: lead        # remembered, not yet cited

Merge them and the guide starts telling people a horse depot sold hash. Keep them apart and each stays interesting, with its own confidence ladder: lead → cited → verified.

Article 6: review reasons name themselves

Nothing is flagged "needs attention". Every reason says what it is and what would settle it, because a queue you cannot act on is a queue you will not work:

• no-name — on the roster and nobody names it. Ride past and read the sign.
• roster-only — a tolerated address invisible to every directory. The most interesting row in the file.
• off-roster-but-open — a source says open where the authority tolerates nothing. Closure, move, or bad number.
• coord-conflict: 63 m — two sources, two buildings. Stand at the door with GPS.
• probable-renumbering — paired with a named neighbour. One look settles both.
• no-usable-coord — no coordinate from a source we may publish. Geocode officially, or go.
• stale-menu: 2011 — the newest evidence is fifteen years old. Assume nothing.

The pipeline, in one line

authority + directories + memory  →  claims  →  places/*/PLACE.yml  →  derived views (CSV, SQL, map)
                                                        ↑
                                              survey writes here, and wins

YAML is the truth. Spreadsheets and databases are derived and disposable; regenerate them, never edit them. The importer bootstraps a place once and afterwards only ever proposes, because the human-authored comments in a PLACE.yml are data too, and a generator that overwrites them is a generator that deletes the fieldwork.

Related

• `skills/room/` — the interior; a place you can enter is both
• `coffeeshop` — the first business type built on this, and it lives in

amsterdank rather than here, because a tolerated address under a Dutch municipal beleidsregel is not a general-purpose idea. place is general; its subclasses belong wherever their jurisdiction and their data do.

• `designs/webtop/OPENSTROLLMAP.md` — the subjective layer over OSM's objective geometry
• `designs/webtop/SIGNED-ASSESSMENTS.md` — why assessments are signed and never averaged
• `designs/webtop/EBIKE-PATH-GRAMMAR.md` — how a place is met at riding speed
• `designs/webtop/TOURS-AND-PLAYLISTS.md` — stringing places into a ride