[Tagging] (no subject)

[Andrew Errington]

On Mon, 05 Dec 2011 21:43:10 Richard Welty wrote:
> if there are stable URLs that point to data on the hotels, it's perfectly
> reasonable to just make the external reference. this has the advantage that
> it doesn't create an update problem over the long run; it's up to them to
> maintain their data, not us to try to keep up.

I agree.  I started drafting something for a chain of hotels in Japan:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Toyoko_Inn

The key is the ref=* tag.  This is very visible on each hotel (usually part of 
the signage) and is used consistently in their brochures and website.

Actually, for English speakers the URL for any hotel is 
http://www.toyoko-inn.com/e_hotel/nnnnn/index.html

Where nnnnn is the reference number, left padded with zeroes.

In fact, for different languages:
http://www.toyoko-inn.com/llll/nnnnn/index.html

llll is a language code (just 'hotel' for Japanese), c_hotel and cn_hotel for 
Chinese Traditional and Simplified respectively, e_hotel for English, de for 
German, and so on.

In my opinion it's sufficient to know that there is a hotel in a certain 
location, and then link from OSM to more data from somewhere else.  It is 
useful to know a few things about the hotel (stored as tags in OSM) but not 
many, and certainly not any kind of 'dynamic' information such as prices.

Best wishes,

Andrew