[OSM-talk] Rendering barangays for the Philippines

[Erik Johansson]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 2:00 PM, David Earl <david at frankieandshadow.com> wrote:
> On 25/11/2008 06:41, Elena of Valhalla wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 12:08 AM, Erik Johansson <erjohan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 4:11 PM, David Earl <david at frankieandshadow.com> wrote:
>>>> Better editor (or API) support for different languages is surely a
>>>> better way to go.
>>> If everyone here are native english speakers or speaks relatively
>>> fluently, and they all take the pragmatic route of using UK centric
>>> tagging how is this ever going to happen?
>>
>> I am not a native english speaker, but the place for language support
>> is the editor, not the API, and the editors are already being
>> translated, so it is already happening
>
> The problem about putting it in the editor (and it isn't just editors -
> it's all the tools, producers and consumers) is that each tool has its
> own means of doing it.
>
> The fact that the database stores place=village is only coincidentally a
> pair of English words. It could equally well be 27:42. It's basically
> something that means "this is a village" or whatever that sentence reads
> in your own language.

But how do you create these translations, who is going to administer
that? The current system works very well, only it doesn't handle
synonyms and tags that are almost the same. By accepting that you
can't make a "structured" system that will fit everyone, the system
will have more possibilties to grow. So making  translation tables
isn't that big of a deal, e.g. Europe has 66761 unique tags and ~400
languages, that's not an enourmous amount of data.


Your and Elenas opinion seems to be that Openstreetmap should be
consistent. That's not my fight; OSM isn't consistent, hasn't been
since 2005.  I'm actually only talking about translation, lets say I
want to tag snow, natural=snow might seem perfect in english but
cultures and languages that deal with snow will have a much bettter
understanding of it and hence using natural=snow will be barbaric.  To
illustrate:

pat=patuqutaujuq ==> natural=snow
pat=patuqun ==> natural=snow
pat=patpat ==> natural=snow

natural=snow ==> (list of alternative meanings)

There are more examples. even with simple things like
highway=crossing. In civilized places there are more types than the
barbaric Swedes has.

/Erik - Chaos is the only option