[OSM-talk] Collapsed names
Igor Brejc
igor.brejc at gmail.com
Sun Jul 27 11:00:11 BST 2008
David Earl wrote:
> In principle it ought to be
> possible to determine the country an object is in, even though it is
> quite hard at present. I think a lot of things would benefit from this
> ability: nationally-styled rendering rules, deciding which way
> roundabouts go, name renderings, validation, improved searching context etc.
>
> David
>
>
I think it is not as easy as it looks. Some countries (Slovenia, for
example) still do not have the whole border drawn in OSM (lack of free
data), so you cannot use this to determine what belongs to what country
- never mind the purely technical difficulties of doing so. And anyway,
even this does not help for multilingual countries like Belgium or Spain.
It is probably more logical to use multilingual place names which should
have an ISO language ID, like "name:ca" so that we can match them with
appropriate language mappings like Name finder:Abbreviations. But this
multilingual tagging is not used universally in the OSM community.
There is also an "is_in" tag, but again, it's not widely used (at least
to my knowledge, I could be wrong).
BTW: it would be good to add ISO language IDs to the Name
finder:Abbreviations page so that the mappings can be computer-matched
more easily.
Igor
--
http://igorbrejc.net
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