[Talk-GB] Phone numbers in little England

[OpenStreetmap HADW]

On 22 August 2013 18:57, Colin Smale <colin.smale at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> I am not sure what your issue was with highway=path etc, but do you mean
> rationalising as in the sense of reducing the number of tags, thus losing
> (subtle) distinctions? I can't see how that is the same as the phone number
> format issue.
>
> Calling the transformation from OSM data to international format "trivial"
> does not do justice to the creativity of mappers when entering phone numbers
> or to telecoms regulators when defining numbering plans. The "four lines of
> regex" will need to be different for each country, and the code will need to

On a brief sampling, failing to comply with the Key:phone guidelines
is a peculiarly British problem, whence the "little England" in the
subject.  I think, because the USA country code is the same as their
"default carrier long distance" code, it is easy for them to just
prefix +, and the rest of the world seems to me more aware that people
in other countries use phones.

> be aware of what country (and area code) the number belongs to. And that's
> of course not including handling the more esoteric cases like "00+44 (01234)
> 654-321". If you want to minimise the amount of code for handling all these
> variations, you will of course benefit from more consistency and more
> normalisation, not less.

There are a little over 1,000 national format numbers in the M25 area,
so even extrapolating to the whole UK, my strategy would be to select
a small number of cases for automatic conversion, and put all the
difficult cases into a separate file that colud be edited manually.  I
wouldn't try to adjust area codes except in director areas (the old
0x1 areas) as that requires the Ofcom code list, which may have
database copyrights.

The hope would be that before larger numbers of businesses got mapped,
and therefore had phone numbers added, there would be so few
precedents for doing it the wrong way. that most people would get it
right just by following existing examples.
>
> Personally, although I suggested E.164, I don't care that much if it's some
> "national" format either, as long as it is well-defined and consistently
> applied.

I was starting from the position that the correct format had been
chosen, give or take certain internal delimiter use.