[OSM-talk] Explicit tagging of name language

[Ed Avis]

Frederik Ramm <frederik <at> remote.org> writes:

>>We could add per-country or per-geographical-area rules about what the
>>'default' language is.
> 
>I guess those don't have to be "added", do they? Is it not implicit that 
>places in France will by default have the French name in their "name" tag?

Yes, but that still has to be added or tagged somewhere.  There is no
'default language' tag on the map currently, AFAIK.

>My guess is that a rule like I suggested would yield the correct answer 
>in 99.5% of cases. The remaining 0.5% should receive special tagging 
>because they are the exception; I don't think we should flood the whole 
>database with unnecessary duplication of values. (Where would it end? 
>Just because occasionally a famous street in France will be known to the 
>English by an English name, should every single street in France thus be 
>tagged "name:fr=..."?)

I am not suggesting that, just that where this particular object has both
name="Tour Eiffel" and name:en="Eiffel Tower", it should get also name:fr.
An object with just a single name tag does not present any problem for user
interfaces to choose which one to show.

You may be right that adding per-country rules would solve it in most cases.
I'm not dogmatic about avoiding such defaults or implicit information; nobody
suggests that every road on the map should be tagged to say drive-on-left or
drive-on-right.  However, I suggested using the existing tagging mechanisms
partly because this would not require any changes to existing software.  It is
sufficient to download an object by itself and that contains the info you need
to choose which name to show.  If regional defaults were introduced, every
user-facing program that wants to do localization would need to be modified
to understand the new scheme.

But also, I think that having defaults in this way makes errors more likely.
If a Gaelic-speaking part of Scotland has a place whose 'name' is in Gaelic,
then if this is just tagged as 'name=N' it is correct.  Not complete, perhaps,
but not wrong as far as it goes.  However if there is a default setting for
Scotland that says names are in English, this tagging is now giving incorrect
data about the language of this name N (even though N may well be correct by
the 'on the ground' rule).  Every mapper must be aware of the default for each
area.  So I think that rather than creating defaults, it is more robust to add
additional information to the small number of objects that need it.  Again,
this is only for those objects tagged with more than one name.

-- 
Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com>