[OSM-talk] Baghdad maps

[Dave]

On 14/02/07, Kristian Thy <thy at 42.dk> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Feb 14, Paul Stimpson wrote:
> > I'm happy to contribute what I can to the effort but I'm not
> Arabic-speaking.
> > Which alphabet (or both) should be used? What can be done to minimise
> any
> > ethnic statement caused by the choice of which street name is chosen?
>
> Without getting into the political side of things, there are name=foo
> for local name and int_name=bar for the internationally known name. Any
> unicode lettering should be fine - I know there are streetnames in
> Arabic in Morocco already. I have also seen a name:en and name:iq scheme
> proposed here on the list for localized names, but I don't know what the
> status of that is.



Yeah, what I was suggesting was to use name:<language-tag>=<name>
where <language-tag> is as defined by the W3C. There's a good overview here:
http://www.w3.org/International/articles/language-tags/Overview.en.php

The same can be done on all name style keys, so int_name:en=...
int_name:ar=...

>From a brief look at the tags and using my (probably quite sparse) knowledge
I'd say the correct tag for Iraq was probably ar-IQ. For transliterations
into latin script ar-Latn-IQ. That's probably the most specific tag,
although unless there's a generic arabic name for something as well, using
the minimal tag rule you can probably just use ar. There should also always
be a name tag for default use, which I think should be the local default
name which here would be in arabic script I'm guessing. If there is only one
language then there's obviously no need to have a specific language tagged
one too.

Politically it's a complete mess. For low level random disputes that happen
in nice idillic country villages in England, there's the usual solution of
using the official name only, thus making it someone else's problem.
Obviously that's not going to work in Iraq right now.

Dave
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