[Talk-in] Indic place names in [name] tags

Arun Ganesh arun.planemad at gmail.com
Wed Jan 18 13:36:39 GMT 2012


On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 6:43 PM, Emilie Laffray <emilie.laffray at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hello,
>
> most people have been using the following convention:
>
> [name] => Native language
> [name:en] => Latin character
> [name:hi] => Local name
>
> Nominatim is capable of searching a name whatever the namespace is. Also,
> the Japanese have been also using tags like [name:jp_romaji] for latin
> transcript.
> I believe that the map should be usable for the people who are living in
> the area not for the "tourists".


Such a name localization effort using the default mapnik tiles as reference
is only going to result in ALL name tags having both english and indic
names (dont forget that a good proportion of Indians are literate in
english). People want to 'see' their hometowns in the local script, and
adding it to the [name] tag is the only option because the osm tiles
renders only that.

If we had indic tiles that rendered from name:hi tags we would not have
this problem because those interested in hindi would use the hindi tiles
and the hindi tags. Now there is just duplication of data in name and
name:hi

I'm afraid I might have been the first one to start this trend 4 years back
when i entered the tamil and english names for chennai just to see if
mapnik was able to render it. In a month, i saw kannada, then hindi names
turned up all over the north, and then bengali in the east. And because
each label is so long, a lot of other place labels get hidden  :/


-- 
j.mp/ArunGanesh
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