[Talk-us] Fwd: [OSM-talk] Using 'Kort' outside of Switzerland

[Peter Davies]

Simon,

I tried Kort here in Portland, Oregon. It gave me some interesting things
to think about. I'd hoped to send them to talk-ch, but it seems I can't
without subscribing in the longer term.  Maybe you can relay this to your
local colleagues?

Kort gave me three types of mission. One was to enter the language of some
street names here in Portland. The second was to enter some speed limits,
and the third was to name a pub.

As feedback, and as a suggestion on how the game might need to be modified
for countries outside Switzerland, I don't think that specifying the
language of a street sign is useful in essentially monolingual countries.
In the USA, street signs should always be considered to be in English.
There is no reason to tag them with any language in OpenStreetMap.  English
is the default.

There are interesting questions, of course: El Camino Real is a common
street name in California, and is obviously Spanish, so what is the correct
English name?  Is it "The Royal Road"? No, I don't think so; we would not
want to translate this to create an American English name.  The correct
name in English is  "El Camino Real."  The Spanish name has been adopted
into English usage.  Local English speakers would all say "El Camino Real."

These thoughts lead me to the "Avenue des Champs-Élysées". Should we
write "Elysian
Fields Avenue" in English? No, of course not.  Almost everyone has heard of
the Champs-Élysées, and no-one would dream of writing the "Elysian Fields".
So should we be translating street names at all?  My conclusion is that
only countries with separate, major linguistic communities actually do
this. Personally I'd like my map to say "Hauptbahnhofstrasse" and not
"Central Station Street", so I could find it on other maps and signs, or
try to ask for it correctly in Solothurn.

On the other two questions, I knew that the urban speed limits were all 25
mph, because this is the blanket limit in Oregon's urban areas, but when I
tried to enter this it was rejected. I was allowed to enter 25, but I
worried that Kort might think this was in km/h.  Would it enter 25 km/h
into OpenStreetMap if someone confirmed my response?  Meanwhile I found all
of central Portland's residential roads without speed tags in JOSM and set
them to 25 mph.

Finally the pub: I didn't know it!  It still remains to be answered.

Thank you for this interesting game,

Peter


On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 4:38 AM, Simon Poole <simon at poole.ch> wrote:

>
> From the talk mailing list (mandatory disclosure: yes I know the authors).
>
>
> -------- Original-Nachricht --------
>
> Hi there,
>
>  I'm very proud to announce that finally Kort[1] (the OSM game) writes
> back it's collected solutions to OSM! All changes are made by the OSM user
> "kort-to-osm"[2], so it's easy to track them.
>
>  Our actions were coordinated with the local (Swiss) community and the
> Data Working Group (DWG). According to the "Mechanical Edit Policy"[3] all
> changesets have the tag mechanical=yes and the users profile page contains
> all relevant information about the project. With all the extra information
> in the changeset comment, we are able to trace back an edit through Kort
> and even further to its source. By the way, for most missions KeepRight[4]
> is the source.
>
>  Until now we made over 280 changes. All changes were validated by at
> least 3 users. There are still lots of solved missions that are just
> waiting to be validated, so that we are able to finally provides them to
> OSM.
>
>  The source code for kort-to-osm is available on GitHub[5], you are very
> welcome to open issues or provide pull requests. The underlying python
> library to access the OpenStreetMap API is osmapi[6].
>
>  ***Apart from this big step, Kort itself has some new features:***
> - Upgrade to Sencha Touch 2.3 -> now all major browsers are supported (IE,
> Firefox, Chrome, Safari)
> - Thanks to our new database server, we can provide missions in the USA as
> well (no more limits!)
> - Our homepage kort.ch is available in English, too :)
>
>
>  Any remarks, comments, issues etc. are very welcome!
>
>  Best regards Stefan
>
>  [1] http://www.kort.ch/index_en.html resp. http://play.kort.ch
> [2] http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/kort-to-osm
>  [3] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mechanical_Edit_Policy
> [4] http://keepright.at
> [5] https://github.com/kort/kort-to-osm
>  [6] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/osmapi
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Talk-us mailing list
> Talk-us at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
>
>
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