[Tagging] brand=* necessary?

Christoph Hormann osm at imagico.de
Thu May 10 11:17:40 UTC 2018


On Thursday 10 May 2018, Colin Smale wrote:
> > I should probably add that what can be considered the name of a
> > feature is ultimately the decision of the local community.
>
> ...as long as there are global ground rules. The autonomy of local
> communities, just like democracy, cannot be unbounded. OSM is a
> global resource. What's a local community, anyway? We don't want
> people in one city doing things differently from another city 10km
> away in the same country, do we?

The definition of a name is pretty universal (as the verbal identifier a 
certain specific object is referred to with).  There is not much local 
variation in that.

> A "name" is what something is "called" by "others." Which "others"
> are considered, is the real debate here. Is it the council? Is it the
> residents within 100m? Is it a tourist who doesn't speak the local
> language? Who gets priority? This is something that cartographers
> (AKA humans determining the rendering) must decide, depending on who
> the map is for.

You are mixing the geographic concept of a name with the cartographic 
concept of a label here - which is of course something a lot of mappers 
do when they choose name tags.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/



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