[Tagging] Draft Proposal: Default Langauge Format

Christoph Hormann osm at imagico.de
Wed Sep 26 18:43:33 UTC 2018


On Wednesday 26 September 2018, Wolfgang Zenker wrote:
>
> it appears to me that before discussing possible solutions we should
> better agree on what the problem is. So far I see several related but
> different problems mixed into one and consequently no possible
> agreement on the solution.

I summarized the advantages of the proposed approach (in the variant 
with a format string which is slightly different from the proposal 
discussed) in

http://blog.imagico.de/you-name-it-on-representing-geographic-diversity-in-names/

The aim is ultimately to:

* allow mappers to accurately document information on names of features 
in all situations that might exist world wide where there are 
verifiable names with as little effort and in the least error prone way 
as possible.
* allow data users to interpret this data without constraints due to 
intransparent preprocessing performed by the mappers.

> d) If there are names in multiple languages combined to form the name
>    tag in case a, I want to know how to split a given value into the
>    component languages.

That would be kind of the inverse to the method proposed here.  Parsing 
the existing aggregate name tag based on additional format information 
tagged would be fairly complicated, very fragile and hard to maintain 
in the databse.  Several proposals have been made to tag which language 
the name tag contains:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Language_information
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Language_information_for_name

but this only covers the single language case and would only have 
addressed a very small fraction of the naming problems in OSM.

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



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