[OSM-talk] Rendering barangays for the Philippines

[D Tucny]

2008/11/26 Erik Johansson <erjohan at gmail.com>

> On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 6:13 PM, Scott Atwood
> <scott.roy.atwood at gmail.com> wrote:
> > [..]  Ideally, there should be a single, consistent representation[...]in
> UK English
> [..]
> > Then, in the UI, the canonical value could be translated into an
> appropriate
> > local expression.
>
> Hi again!
>
> Since there is little consistency in English tags, I don't see why you
> first canonize a list of one-true-way tags then translate it to other
> languages.  There are many things that aren't mentioned in our tags,
> even more isn't mentioned on the wiki, how will you supply
> translations for these things?
>
> And why is it important for foreign tags to be
> 1. documented in the wiki
> 2. translated in the editor interface
> 3. having a good English translation
>
> But you it's ok to use shitty english tags.
>
>
> Consistency is the stigma of OSM, that's what's sweet.


The issue here is that where ever there is a need to express intent in a
language other than English some software needs to be modified to allow it
to work...
One option, as mentioned before, is the editors, through the use of
translated presets or a more indepth translation of tags users could work in
whichever language they were most comfortable with for most things (tagging
non-basic things, especially if they hadn't been translated, and how to deal
with that regarding lack of translation could be tricky) but what would get
sent to the API and stored in the database would be the 'standard' tags, be
they english/pseudo english as now, numeric keys or something more exotic.
This allows for all tools that use the data to work with a globally
consistent(ish) set of tags for things that refer to the same concept.

Another option would be in every application that uses the data, renderers
etc, if every language can have it's own keys and values the users of the
data would need to be modified to support the ability to detect every
possible language in both the keys and values with no clues, if they don't
then they couldn't use the data available in other languages...

The key thing here though is that the keys and values that are in use are
only English because a) that's where it started and, probably more
importantly, b) because English thanks to it's pretty wide spread use is
really more likely to be understood around the world than  most other
languages, whether or not this influenced the decision, I don't know, but I
think it's a good point...

I, personally, feel that keys and standard values, e.g. the standard values
within place, should be ascii. I feel that there should be some form of
standardness (real word?) to them so that people can express their intent in
a way that data users are likely to understand. I feel it's important to
document them as much as possible so that people adding data can use
preexisting tags that might cover their needs rather than created
unnecessary new tags. I don't care if all keys are stored as random 128bit
values expressed as hex in the API or English or German or French or <insert
your own language here>, as long as only standard ascii characters were
used...

d
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20081126/1f0a22e1/attachment.html>