Reverse best place type selection logic

[nick-nlb]

Issue

b/530339277

Description

This issue manifests in two places: maps being dropped in explore pages (just showing ranking charts), and the map tool being unable to load charts for certain places.

This can be seen at the following link:

https://dev.datacommons.org/tools/map#%26sv%3DUnemploymentRate_Person%26pc%3D0%26denom%3DCount_Person%26pd%3DgeoId%2F34%26ept%3DCounty

The problem became symptomatic with the introduction of a data problem: places like the US, Canada, New Jersey now have "Place" as a placeType in addition to "Country", "Country" and "State" respectively.

While this data ingestion issue needs to be separately fixed, it highlighted an issue in the way that website prioritized order.

[gemini-code-assist]

Summary of Changes

Hello, I'm Gemini Code Assist¹! I'm currently reviewing this pull request and will post my feedback shortly. In the meantime, here's a summary to help you and other reviewers quickly get up to speed!

This pull request addresses an issue where incorrect place type selection was causing display problems in explore pages and map tools. By reversing the sorting logic for place types, the system now correctly prioritizes more specific classifications (like City or State) over generic ones (like Place), ensuring consistent data rendering even when multiple types are associated with a single entity.

Highlights

• Logic Update: Updated the _get_best_type function to prioritize more specific place types by sorting with lower ranks first, rather than higher ranks.
• Type Handling: Improved handling of unknown types by assigning them a lower priority (math.inf) and adjusted the sorting logic to prefer standard names over 'AdministrativeArea' variants.
• Test Coverage: Updated migration verification tests to include additional place types, ensuring the new sorting logic behaves correctly with multiple type definitions.

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[gemini-code-assist]

Code Review

This pull request refactors the _get_best_type helper function in server/services/datacommons.py to prioritize more specific place types (lower non-zero ranks) and place unrecognized types last, updating the associated unit tests accordingly. Feedback on this change points out a typo in the updated docstring and suggests using min() instead of sorted() to find the best type more efficiently in O(N) time.

[juliawu]

Thank you for also updating the docstring and tests!