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<p><span style="font-size: 12px;">I am not sure what your issue was with highway=path etc, but do you mean r</span><span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">ationalising as in the sense of reducing the number of tags, thus losing (subtle) distinctions? I can't see how that is the same as the phone number format issue.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">Calling the transformation from OSM data to international format "trivial" does not do justice to the creativity of mappers when entering phone numbers or to telecoms regulators when defining numbering plans. The "four lines of regex" will need to be different for each country, and the code will need to be aware of what country (and area code) the number belongs to. And that's of course not including handling the more esoteric cases like "00+44 (01234) 654-321". If you want to minimise the amount of code for handling all these variations, you will of course benefit from more consistency and more normalisation, not less.</span></p>
<p>Personally, although I suggested E.164, I don't care that much if it's some "national" format either, as long as it is well-defined and consistently applied.</p>
<p>Colin</p>
<p>On 2013-08-22 18:35, Richard Fairhurst wrote:</p>
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<pre>Colin Smale wrote:</pre>
<blockquote type="cite" style="padding-left:5px; border-left:#1010ff 2px solid; margin-left:5px">Someone needs to stick up for the data consumers; it's not *all* about the mappers, and anyway most mappers are not so lazy that they can't be bothered to conform to conventions.</blockquote>
<pre>As a data consumer I wish people would stop sticking up for me and my kin!
IMX more heartache has been caused by well-meaning attempts to rationalise
tagging "for the data consumers" than by the original tagging
eccentricities. Take the highway=path farrago: I have a whole load of extra
code in my Lua osm2pgsql and OSRM includes just to cope with this. If we'd
stuck with highway=cycleway and highway=footway life would have been much
easier. (Though I should point out that embedded Lua is ridiculously awesome
for this sort of thing.)
Transforming phone numbers from OSM tags into a uniform, international
format is trivial. It's about four lines of regex, I guess, and anyone using
phone numbers for national purposes will need to transform it the other way
anyway. If you can cope with stuff like
<a href="http://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/manually-building-a-tile-server-12-04/">http://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/manually-building-a-tile-server-12-04/</a>
(or OSRM, or whatever you're using) then it's not exactly going to faze you.
By all means tidy up the phone numbers if it's what floats your boat, but
don't kid yourself that it'll make data consumers' life any easier.
cheers
Richard
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