[Talk-us] Cardinal directions on highways & foreign languages

[Angela Morley]

 I've come across an issue with the current implementation of cardinal
directions in roles of relations. In certain areas of the world, roles are
being used to determine the cardinal direction of a way in accordance with
the AASHTO requirements, however those locales change the official name of
the cardinal direction to the name of the direction in their local
languages on road signage. Examples include highways in Puerto Rico and
Quebec.

Should the tags north, south, east, and west be assigned in these locations
according to the official language used on the road signs for those
locations (precedent exists like this with Key:name), or should they remain
English worldwide, regardless of country?

This problem has come up in a bug report I was filing with OSRM where they
are currently just spitting out values like $north directly into the end
user instructions because they don't know what the best way to handle the
problem is yet. I had asked for it to be rendered as North, however the
question of internationalization came up, and was so valid and pressing I
thought it prudent to start a conversation about the topic. ( If you're
curious, the original bug report: https://github.com/
Project-OSRM/osrm-backend/issues/4918 )

Angela
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/attachments/20180227/d79b8879/attachment.html>