Tree names in different languages

[westnordost]

I read that SCEE has some functionality to add/edit the species/genus of trees, awesome!

Now, a useful addition to that would be if SCEE would be able to recognize which localized tree name relates to which international (i.e. Latin, not English) species/genus name, so to be able to...

• always show the localized name (too) to avoid misunderstandings. E.g. it would be nice if a "Quercus" is shown as "Oak" if your locale is English
• detect which wikidata ID relates to which species/genus to also properly display a name. E.g. nobody understands what a Q165145 is, but everyone understands what an "English Oak" (Stieleiche in German, very common in cities) is.
• detect conflict errors
• (maybe) always default to tagging the Latin name? (Or, otherwise maybe not encourage double/triple-tagging, i.e. localized name+latin name+wikidata id because that's such a pointless waste of time!)

Now, I also read in the readme that...

Allows providing a file containing translated tree names instead of the default English ones

No need for that! Check out this wikidata query, and this is the reason why I posted this idea:

SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?itemLabel ?taxon_common_name WHERE {
  ?item wdt:P171+ ?taxon .
  ?taxon wdt:P279 wd:Q10884 .
  ?item wdt:P1843 ?taxon_common_name.
  
  FILTER (lang(?taxon_common_name) = "en") .
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
}

Try it out!

This could be a build script, one query for each available language.

[westnordost]

By the way, at least the "displaying the localized name of a tree" would be useful on vanilla StreetComplete, too, as an enhancement for the "things overlay" but overall a tree overlay like it exists in SCEE is going to profit a lot more from that.

[Helium314]

Currently there is no overlay (except maybe a custom overlay), but a quest that asks for tree genus / species.
Still the tree species is displayed in the nearby elements in that quest.

Thanks for the query, this should be really useful. I remember I had tried to find some source for latin <-> <language> names, and only found proprietary stuff. But apparently I didn't think of wikidata!

(it will still be a while until I start working on this, currently it feels like I'm drowning in app-related work)

[westnordost]

Doesn't the tree layer of MapComplete use exclusively wikidata to tag the species? Not sure, but I think I read something like that once. So being able to translate wikidata tags will also be very useful.

(it will still be a while until I start working on this, currently it feels like I'm drowning in app-related work)

Sorry to hear that, I bet I am somewhat to blame for that, since I completely re-did the settings screen to which you certainly made a few additions. Feel free to ask me about it or ask for help, you got my email and phone number after all. I am also in the slack OSM chat. Or @ mention me in discussion/forum etc. (E.g. if you have any setting in the app which requires a number picker - a number picker dialog would need to actually be implemented first - there's nothing built-in yet. But I already did a bit of research and implementation would be... not that many LOC.)

And anyway, I posted this here rather than as an issue because it should not be a TODO but an idea, which really anyone could implement, e.g. people interested in that tree quest / overlay.

[Helium314]

And anyway, I posted this here rather than as an issue because it should not be a TODO but an idea, which really anyone could implement, e.g. people interested in that tree quest / overlay.

I think it would be a very useful improvement for the tree quest, and I already put it on my own todo list.

Sorry to hear that, I bet I am somewhat to blame for that, since I completely re-did the settings screen to which you certainly made a few additions

Somewhat, but it already was bad way before I tried merging the new settings screen.
Most of the SCEE settings are in separate settings screens, so if I can still use them it might not be much work.

@ravenfeld has offered to help here, and also sent me this link on how I could keep the old settings screens.
If this works out, the only thing that must be re-done is the per-quest settings, which are an addition to the quest selection screen.

But I guess soon there is more to be re-done in compose anyway, so avoiding the re-write is only a short-term solution.

[westnordost]

Most of the SCEE settings are in separate settings screens, so if I can still use them it might not be much work.

Right, hmm. But the whole Settings Activity is now Compose-based. Since your settings are likely in an own Fragment, and a Fragment is not really a View, it can not easily be embedded in a Compose-based view. As far as I know. Didn't look into that yet.
Hmm, but ... if you don't want to migrate the screen to Compose (which might ultimately be less work, but your choice, of course), you could try the following:

1. Add parameter onClickSceeSettings: () -> Unit to the SettingsScreen and invoke it when clicking on the item that opens the SCEE settings
2. hoist that parameter up in the Settings navhost, i.e. it is also a parameter there
3. Finally, in the Activity, i.e. the class that contains the NavHost, you get that callback and can do whatever, e.g. add the SceeSettingsFragment as a child fragment which will display above the compose-based settings.

[Helium314]

Thanks, the old settings screens are now working. So at least I can do the settings migration later when I have more time.

[westnordost]

Check this out:

https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/compare/wikidata-tree-taxons?expand=1

I wrote a build script to pull the genus and species of trees in all languages from wikidata. There remain a few open TODOs on that to filter out homonyms and wrongly named ones, though. Also, there are two issues that I think cannot really be solved:

1. tree genus names are written in plural (in the German) translation, e.g. "Eichen" :-/
2. the common/primary name in the English translation for both species and genus is always the latin/scientific name, i.e. not "Maple" but "Acer" :-/
3. the wikidata quality is a bit patchy, sometimes the name starts with a capital letter, sometimes not, sometimes the " x " for hybrids doesn't have spaces on both sides, sometimes it has, there are variations on how the scientific names in different languages is written etc.

On the StreetComplete side, what would be missing is a small class that loads this data (on demand) into two-way hashmaps and thus can translate from any language to any other language plus wikidata id and scientific name.

I won't be continuing on this (soon), though. So if you or someone else would like to finish or work on this, go ahead! It certainly is more useful for SCEE than for SC. For SC, it would just be needed to show the localized name of a tree species in the "feature name" text below the quest question.
For SCEE, one could search by localized name for the tree overlay. ("also known as" / synonym information is also available on wikidata, the query would just need to be extended to include that in the result.)