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

[Michael Collinson]

At 12:53 AM 1/10/2008, Stefan Baebler wrote:
>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.

I hadn't thought of the int_name tag. Yes, that makes perfect sense.

Mike
Stockholm