[Tagging] International and UN names

[Minh Nguyen]

Vào lúc 02:09 2022-03-15, Jeroen Hoek đã viết:
> Are there any cases where the UN names are missing from the name, 
> int_name, alt_name, official_name tags and their language specific 
> variants (e.g., name:en)? For larger entities like countries these tend 
> to be quite exhaustive.
> 
> OSM already takes care to use the names that correspond with local usage 
> and custom. Is there a use-case for data consumers to specifically query 
> UN-sanctioned names instead?

AFAICT, int_name=* is frequently used for multiple purposes:

* A UN/ISO 3166-1 country name in English, especially where it differs 
from the common English name, as in "Czechia" or "Viet Nam". This isn't 
limited to countries; there are ISO names for subnational divisions too.

* On subnational features in East Asia, a romanization in an 
"international" scheme such as pinyin (Chinese) or Revised (Korean). 
name:*-Latn (such as name:zh-Latn) is increasingly used as a less 
ambiguous and more correct alternative. English often adopts these names 
verbatim, minus the diacritics, but they aren't inherently in English.

* The English name of a multinational brand, such as Starbucks or 
7-Eleven. name:en would be more correct for this purpose.

* For world-famous cities and landmarks, an internationally recognizable 
name for the feature in the same language as name, by analogy with 
nat_name, reg_name, and loc_name.

UN/ISO names would be useful for data consumers that want to avoid the 
appearance of bias in a disputed area. (Whoever has de facto, 
on-the-ground control in a dispute usually isn't a neutral party.) 
Smaller languages are less likely to be signposted or whatever, but 
tagging nominal translations is often frowned upon, so these languages 
could fall back to int_name. That said, the mixed usage of int_name 
undermines these use cases.

Keys like name:UN:en indicate both a country code (per ISO 3166-1) and a 
language code (ISO 639). But it's a nonstandard way to combine the two 
codes. The standard format would be name:en-UN. That would be consistent 
with many other keys, such as name:zh-CN and name:en-PH, which are used 
for nationally preferred names, especially on disputed features. There 
are few enough occurrences of name:UN:* that I think they would be 
transitioned over to this format easily.

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us