[OSM-talk] Handling of towns with different or alternative names

Matthias Julius lists at julius-net.net
Tue Jan 27 21:36:08 GMT 2009


Simon Ward <simon at bleah.co.uk> writes:

> On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 02:50:37PM -0500, Russ Nelson wrote:
>> 
>> On Jan 27, 2009, at 2:08 PM, Manfred Podzkiewitz wrote:
>> 
>> > Hello, i have a question about the handling of unoffical, or ethnic,  
>> > or
>> > historic names of towns and villages.
>> The TIGER import in the USA uses name_1 for alternate names.  Perhaps  
>> we should view all tags starting with "name" as potential names?     
>> That points to using "nameEN" for the English name of a city, and  
>> "nameDE" for the German name of the same city, etc.
>> 
>> Or should that be "name:EN" and "name:DE"?
>
> These already exist, see Key:name[1].
>
> This doesn’t account for multiple names in the same language, though.  I
> can also imagine a place having several old names over time, while
> old_name=* really only allows for one.

IMHO there really needs to be a well defined mechanism that allows a
tag to have multiple values.  To invent new keys like old_name_1 and
old_name_2 is certainly not optimal.

The FAQ has the recommendation of separating multiple values with a
';' and to enter a semicolon that is part of the data as ';;'.

That's actually error prone if someone enters a semicolon who doesn't
know about the rule.  I think that should better be reversed or '\;'
be used as separator because this is much less likely to appear in
regular data.

Of course it is also possible to use relations.  But, for tags that
simply add a property to an object (like old_name) this is overkill.

Matthias




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