[OSM-talk] Crossroad names

[Frederik Ramm]

Hans,

    OSM is a "help yourself" project. Street names are important in 
Europe, that's why Europeans helped themselves by making a database that 
records, and a map that shows, street names. People in countries where 
crossroads names are very important are invited to help themselves and 
improve OSM to the point where it becomes easy to record and display 
crossroads names.

(OSM is quite popular in Japan so I'm surprised to hear from you that 
OSM should be "extremely hard to read" there. The Japanese OSM community 
does possess considerable technical skills so I would have assumed that 
if crossroads names are as important as you say, they would have 
developed something to implement them in the mean time.)

> 1. The entire project is extremely european centric
> 2. Major features who needed there are not supported (for example
> crossroad names)
> 3. If the map is so unsuitable for non-european regions, nobody will use
> it -> nobody will participate -> it seems that nobody needs these features

This logic doesn't work. OSM has bootstrapped itself from nothing to 
what it is today in Europe. People in Europe participated in OSM before 
the map was usable, and made it usable. People in Japan and Korea can do 
the same.

OSM is not an European project, OSM is a project that gives everyone on 
the planet the chance to participate and make a good map for their area.

To my knowledge there hasn't been a proposal from Japan or Korea about 
how to map or render crossroads names; I'm sure it would be favourably 
considered by the wider community. It would make no sense for someone in 
Europe to develop something that he believes is useful in Japan or Korea 
when he doesn't even know the local circumstances. As I sad, OSM is a 
help-yourself project; people in Japan or Korea are welcome to help 
themselves.

The way things like this often happen is that someone invents some kind 
of "hack" to achieve what they want - for example, it would be slightly 
incorrect but possible to place a node at a named intersection and tag 
it "place=locality, name=blah blah". This would be rendered on the map. 
If it turns out that there's demand for this kind of information and 
people start to add it more frequently, someone would perhaps say "uh 
guys, place=locality is not really good for an intersection name, let's 
make up something better", and things would run their course.

Are you in touch with mappers in Japan or Korea, and if so, what is 
their opinion regarding intersection names? Are they waiting for someone 
to tell them what to do, or have they invented some kind of hack to add 
this (according to you) very important information? If they haven't, 
then why not?

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"