[Talk-GB] Phone numbers in little England

Paul Bivand paul.bivand at blueyonder.co.uk
Fri Aug 23 21:15:25 UTC 2013


I've been trying to map phone numbers in +44 style for businesses (where it 
may be as useful as operator= as well as name=.

However, I normally ignore spacing because the concept of area code is dying. 

I haven't even heard it being used for snob purposes recently (as signifying 
the wrong side of the tracks).

If we want people to use services based on OSM to find chinese takeaways (or 
other businesses), then we need to include the phone number. 

Review services can be on top - but I suspect businesses would like having a 
'vanilla' record with a link to their website rather than always getting 
linked to ratings as others do.

Paul Bivand

On Friday 23 Aug 2013 04:04:31 Richard Fairhurst wrote:
> Colin Smale wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> A quick gander at http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org.uk/keys/phone#values
> suggests:
> 
> - s/[^0-9]//g
> - s/^0/44/
> 
> will actually cope with almost every value currently extant. The exceptions
> are a few without area code at all, and a few semicolon-delimited multiple
> values (which is frowned upon in any case).
> 
> > The "four lines of regex" will need to be different for each country
> 
> Oh, indeed, but that's the case for most tagging in OSM anyway. Fortunately
> OSM is a spatial database so it's easy to do region-specific
> transformations!
> 
> I don't particularly care about this specific issue because I can't really
> envisage circumstances in which I would want to use phone numbers derived
> from OSM. What I'm trying to get across is the general point that
> non-consumers' attempts to "normalise" tags, thinking that data consumers
> will appreciate it, isn't necessarily as helpful as you'd think.
> 
> cheers
> Richard
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --
> View this message in context:
> http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Phone-numbers-in-little-England-tp5774459p57
> 74643.html Sent from the Great Britain mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
> 
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