[Taginfo-dev] Finding Tags (and achieving a word translation list) - How?

[Stefan Keller]

Dear taginfo developers

I'd like to turn taginfo into an even more searchable
internationalized tool: Use case is that somebody knows a keyword - in
any language - but has not a clue what the most used (set of)
tag/value is for that keyword. I already discussed some issues about
this with Jochen and we made already some experiments based on our
"TagFinder".

My current solution path is a two-phase process (after the user typed
in a keyword):
1. The (probably non-english) word is translated by Google Translation,
2. current taginfo services are called at least once for searching key
names and once for lookin for value names.

Then it turned out, that Google Translation does not do a good job
translating e.g. german words to english (and it's only offering one
single result). The problem is, that the translated english words
often are not the ones which exist in the OSM database.

My idea is now to make this process better with a (manually?)
maintained translation list of key-values whih indicate which is the
preferred target tag-value. And I already have a filtered list of
about 1000 tag-value-pairs from my PostGIS terminal
(http://152.96.80.16/ ). I know about
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim/Special_Phrases but
that's covering only a fraction of the tag-value-pair.

In addition in the tag-value-pair translation list - e.g. from german
to english - a distinction should be made between tag-values that
classify a spatial feature and tag-values which are only "facettes"
(meaning: additional attributes) of a spatial feature.

How could we achieve a maintained version such a list?

Yours, Stefan