Do you really want to use the GetGov? There are a lot of options. (And another Discourse forum thread.)
@kku has noted that there was a huge surge of Place cleaning tools and gramplets. That related in a lot of overlap. So he believes there should be a shakeout and possibly some consolidaton:
- Check Place Titles tool (Family Tree Processing)
- Extract Place Data from a Place Title tool (Family Tree Processing)
- Fix Place Coordinates tool (Family Tree Processing)
- GetGOV gramplet
- Lokpurigado (Place cleaning) gramplet {JMichault project @jmichault}
- Lokoj (PlaceFrCog) gramplet {JMichault project @jmichault }
- MultiMergeGramplet gramplet Place Automerge {Isotammi project}
- Place Cleanup gamplet
- Place Completion tool (Utilities)
- Place Coordinate Gramplet view view mode (Geography)
- Places and Coordinates gramplet
- PlaceTool gramplet {Isotammi project}
- PlaceUpdate gramplet
From the Gramps User maillist:
On Tue, Jan 29, 2019 at 4:19 AM Sebastian Schubert wrote:
I am thinking about migrating my places to the GOV structure with the GetGOV addon. However, I have quite a big number of places already, which are somewhat based on the GOV database, so this seems like a lot of work.
In particular, it seems to require a lot of manual merging of double places.
On Tue, Jan 29, 2019 at 10:02 AM Paul Culley wrote:
I agree you have some work ahead of you. I would not attempt to “just change some of the IDs to the GOV ID”. As you say that would introduce inconsistencies in the data compared to the GOV data.
I don’t care for the GOV system myself, as I find searching for a place to be rather difficult, I think they only return a match if you happen to know the exact local place name. (Try a search for “Berlin, Germany”, as an English user I expected something, but get no results). But I recognize it is better if you want the hierarchy of places to reflect changes over time.
If I had to do this, I would start with the biggest places and then work down (Countries, then states etc.). Use GetGOV to load a place, and then merge with your preexisting manually added version. Then look at the merged result and see if it needs to be changed, removing extra alternative names, and extra enclosed-by data. You would generally want to keep the GOV data, and drop conflicting manually entered data.
I created the Place Cleanup tool gramplet which uses the GeoNames data. That data is very easy to search, but contains almost no historical information. I originally thought I might do a similar tool for GOV data, or integrate into a single tool, however the lack of a GOV search API that works well made me lose interest.
The Place Cleanup tool has as its first level search, a search in the local data (NOT in the GeoNames data). That can greatly assist in finding duplicate places and merging them.