[OSM-talk] "As on ground" country names

[Michael Collinson]

At 03:06 PM 1/9/2008, Stefan Baebler wrote:
>Hi!
>
>I'd imagine that OSM's "as on ground" rule for primary names should
>also apply for country nodes (tagged with place=country), however this
>doesn't seem to be the case at the moment.
>http://osmxapi.hypercube.telascience.org/api/0.5/node%5bplace=country%5d
>shows that primary names are english names for most of the countries.
>
>Any thoughts?
>Do we bend the rule here in favor of english over local name?
>How about multilingual countries (eg. Switzerland)

The main use at the moment will be for the "international generic 
map" that OSM hosts directly (as 80n writes) but more will come.

I suggest therefore for the moment that the default name should 
English, repeated as name:en and (at least) the name(s) of the 
country in its own language(s) and script be entered using the ISO 
639-1  [1] language namespace tag:

place=country
name=Japan
name:en=Japan
name:ja=<kanji for "nippon">

That will then support national maps as they start to appear and also 
be useful in searching - I am doing some experimental work resolving 
the various values in is_in tags back to the actual place and place type.


Mike
Stockholm

[1]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes