[Tagging] RFC - UN LOCODE tags

[doug.fraser at tarisoga.com]

Hi everyone, 

The company I work for deals with shipping ports, UN LOCODEs, and shipping 
schedules - I had hoped to use OSM to correlate geographical type info and 
LOCODEs.  The problem has become messier than I ever thought, and 
unfortunately OSM does not have much in the way of LOCODE related data. 

At this point, we have a well maintained list of LOCODEs and other such 
data that I keep track with the UN list as it is updated.  So I thought 
it'd be useful to put all that into OSM and clean up the handful of LOCODE 
tags that I have seen in OSM.  This list also includes IATA data and some 
other port type info - everything has been gleaned from public data sources 
like the UN, so I'm sure there are no license related issues.  I'm also 
confident of the accuracy since I'm the one responsible for maintaining the 
data. 

I will write up a feature proposal on the wiki to outline the details, but 
first I wanted to see if there were any comments or advice people might 
have.  I do plan to automate the updates - none of this is map data per se, 
but just tags, so I assume there won't be any real complications. So I will 
read all about the guidelines around automation. 

The questions I had are: 

1) the UN provides geographical coordinates of these LOCODEs, typically the 
city center.  Is there any standard that OSM adheres to regarding the 
location of cities?  Anyone have any pointers to info I should read? 

2) alternative place names - the UN provides some data and we have data 
from other sources.  The data is good, but is there any consensus on this 
topic about how OSM ought to operate? 

3) locations/cities not in OSM at all - adding these in is a separate task 
entirely so I will leave that till I understand OSM better.  But if someone 
could point me in the right direction, that'd be great. 

Thanks
doug