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

[Stefan Baebler]

Dave Stubbs wrote:
> On Jan 9, 2008 4:22 PM, Michael Collinson <mike at ayeltd.biz> wrote:
>   
>> 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:
>>
>>     
>
> I'd suggest keeping the exact same philosophy as used everywhere else.
> If you want a generalised english map at the top layer, then just
> rejig the renderer to use the name:en tag. There aren't that many
> countries so it shouldn't be too hard to ensure they all have an :en
> tag. And that way we're not special-casing data entry.
>
>   
Even if there is no name:en, the international renderer can fallback to 
the int_name and then finally to local name attribute.

Sticking to the "as on ground" rule can probably elegantly avoid some of 
the known naming disputes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Geographical_naming_disputes

Stefan