[OSM-dev] Multilingual Maps Overlays

[Andy Allan]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 9:09 AM, Claudius <claudius.h at gmx.de> wrote:

> Now I recall where I see the problem with a fallback rule like
>
> de: name:de, name:en, name:fr, name
>
> If you look at Germany in the OSM db most of the placenames just have
> the german name in the name-tag but don't reproduce the redundant
> information in name:de. If you would take this example node:
>
> place=city
> name=München
> name:en=Munich
>
> the above rule would lead to the english name being shown on the german
> name overlay. So the fallback needs to be location aware and should
> probably not trigger in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Yeah, that's actually a bigger problem with the way we're tagging. I
get a slightly bizarre experience using nominatim - if I search for
"United Kingdom" the first result is "Royaume Uni", if I search for
"Scotland" it results in "Schottland". In both cases this is because
nominatim is picking up my browser language preferences - there's no
name:en on either so it falls back to name:de, name:fr or name:es -
and only if all those tags are missing from an object will it show me
the english name for things in the UK/USA/Canada.

Which is understandable, but seems bizarre to most people.

Cheers,
Andy