[Tagging] brand=* necessary?

Colin Smale colin.smale at xs4all.nl
Thu May 10 11:44:51 UTC 2018


On 2018-05-10 13:17, Christoph Hormann wrote:

> 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. 
Referred to, by whom? Who is the persona here? What's the use case? 

> 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.

Interesting - my intention was the exact opposite. The point I was
trying to make (and I think we agree on this) is that a simple "name" is
subjective. Different renderers will make different decisions about what
data to add to the resulting map, according to what they want to
portray. 

A physical sign is analogous to a label - it is a depiction of an
attribute in a certain context. The "facts" are simply that there is a
sign with certain characters on it, in a style that leads us to derive
that this is the name of an object to which it is attached or adjacent.
That is subtly different to the "facts" about the name of the object,
which can be subjective. It depends on who you ask, and in what context.
Multiple different answers may be equally correct, in different
contexts.
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