[Talk-GB] City names translation

[Pavlo Dudka]

Lester,
I don't agree that ukrainian or other-language place names is secondary
information.
We should not extract this information to external data source.
Why don't you say "Let's remove population-tag. Values are changing, let's
integrate OSM with some service like http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/index.html"?
Reason is very obvious: implementation of integration between dozens
different services that use OSM-data and [Translation DB]/[Population DB]
is much more expensive than storing translations/population in OSM-DB.

Assuming [Translation DB] exists..
"name"/"name:en" can't be the key for place names, since different cities
with the same names in english may have different names in another
language. (I can't find an example, but I am sure there are some)
"wikipedia"-tag(or less used "wikidata") might be the key for place names,
but wiki-DB doesn't contain records/articles about all planet settlements.
Wikidata might be [Translation DB].
But.. Do you really think that developers of different OSM services will
integrate their software with Wikidata? No, they'll say - put translations
into name:**, we use those tags as recommended in
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_Internationalization

2014-08-06 14:22 GMT+03:00 Lester Caine <lester at lsces.co.uk>:

> Pavlo - one of the things that has irritated me from day one is the poor
> way that the data API has been designed.
> ...
> My comments about secondary databases are along that line, so that
> rather than having 'english' keys in the main database one has numeric
> keys and a lookup table which gives a translated view of all of the
> structure. So one logs in using Ukrainian and sees everything in
> Ukrainian ...
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/attachments/20140806/c79e34a7/attachment.html>