[OSM-talk] [OSM-newbies] avoid repeating the name tag twice

Tal tal.bav at gmail.com
Wed May 6 14:36:58 BST 2009


On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 3:02 PM, Stephan Plepelits <
skunk at xover.htu.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:

> On Wed, May 06, 2009 at 01:53:57PM +0200, Ben Laenen wrote:
> > So, in short: I'm not sure a "language" tag would work here. The
> > languages should be known from the political entity it's located in,
> > and since the places in areas with more than one official language are
> > tagged with name:nl, name:fr etc, that's more than enough already, and
> > a language tag gives unnecessary information. And it's especially a bad
> > idea if it defines a certain order of importance.
> But how does the system know which is the "official" language for that
> region? As far as I know, there's no function yet, so a language-tag would
> be useful (and could for example be applied to the administrative boundary
> as to save redundant information).


Regarding the "official language", or more precisely, which of the available
languages to use, I've always felt that this is a rendering issue, sort of.
I mean, that this is a higher level knowledge that should be an input to the
rendering software, in addition to the osm db, much like the rule file. This
new knowledge, which might reside in the rule file, should not be a part of
the osm db.

Everyone with sufficient knowledge and skills can draw themselves a nice map
in their favorite language using a custom rule file: Dutch people in Brussels
can leave out French names, Hebrew speakers can omit the Arab names, and
vice versa. Why do you even need an official language? I guess you want to
draw a single map, here on this site, which will be good for almost
everyone.
My solution to this situation would be to add polygon constraints support to
the renderers rule files. For example, drop this line in the
mapnik/t at hrules file:
   - for Brussels (=polygon cordinates) replace names with ":fr - :nl"

I placed france first. Any angry Duch want to start an edit war? Go ahead,
fight over the poor rule file, not over the db. I hope it would be easier to
continue the collaboration efforts on the db while disagreeing on the rule
file.

This would also allow other forms of localizations per country. Maybe it is
custom in a certain country to draw motorways in yellow - they can have that
on the osm site just for them.

Sorry for barging in, just wanted to throw in my ideal solution.
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