[OSM-dev] [OSM-talk] Handling of towns with different or alternative names

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 12:18 AM, Stefan de Konink <stefan at konink.de> wrote:
> Simon Ward wrote:
>>> I think that leaves us with an unoptimal situation where editors
>>> either have to shove things into the same key delimited by some token
>>> like ";" as is currently recommended but AFAIK not supported by any
>>> renderer (or any tool?), or to put what's logically the same data
>>> under different keys.
>>
>> Is using different keys (when they're likely to be unknown to the
>> renderers) or multiple tags with the same key name any better supported
>> in the renderers?
>
> The most logical way of tagging is still using the xml namespace idea.
> name:en,name:nl etc. This is used for the different Dutch layers and is
> clean. If someone wants to render his own map he will prioritize the
> name:whatever over name, and creates his fancy map.

Perhaps for this specific use case, but we're still left with the
problem where you genuinely want to stick two distinct things into one
tag, like when multiple values of Key:shop or Key:amenity are
applicable, the current solutions to that are:

1. Create two nodes/ways/* covering the same area and tag them differently
2. Use multiple keys where one key would logically make sense
3. Put different values delimited by ";" which is recommended but
supported by no-one so users usually use [1] or [2], and even if it
were supported users of the data would end up parsing user-generated
XML/DB values which isn't a good way to structure XML or a DB from a
query perspective.

But just to be clear there are probably good reasons for the
current/future data model unknown to me, but it's still a crappy
situation as far as the end user editor or parser of the data is
concerned.