[OSM-talk] Rendering barangays for the Philippines

Scott Atwood scott.roy.atwood at gmail.com
Tue Nov 25 17:13:07 GMT 2008


On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 6:34 AM, Erik Johansson <erjohan at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

I'm afraid I have to agree with David on this point.  Ideally, there should
be a single, consistent representation for any given abstract concept.  The
fact that for the most part, these values are in UK English is more an
accident of history and we'd have tools to abstract that away from the end
user.
Even in the case you cite, if we found a need to tag three different kinds
of snow, we could come up with a canonical representation for it, which for
all I care could be represent in the database as:

natural=patuqutaujuq
natural=patuqun
natural=patpat

or

natural=old_snow
natural=powdery_snow
natural=snow

Then, in the UI, the canonical value could be translated into an appropriate
local expression.

-Scott

-- 
Scott Atwood

Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia.  ~H.G. Wells
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