[OSM-talk] Persian/Arabian Gulf Tagging

[Christoph Hormann]

On Friday 18 June 2021, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
>
> Not sure we "need" the language code. As you wrote, the names would
> be prescripted in those countries for any language, and many
> countries only have one official language, for all those cases it
> seems save to assume that the official name is in the official
> language, i.e.
> official_name:SA=...

Well - that assumes that (a) all countries only have one official 
language and (b) that national naming conventions/rules propagate to 
other languages in a well defined fashion that does not require 
individual case representation in the data.  Neither of these is the 
case practically.

What i am not sure is if "official_name" is the right choice of key.  
While the cases we have in mind here (Like Persian Gulf and Sea of 
Japan) we have official naming conventions in the countries in question 
(and ones ubiquitous enough to qualify as verifiable in OSM fwiw) there 
are certainly also cases where there are diverging national cultural 
conventions without an officially defined rule behind that are still 
verifiable.  Hence it might make more sense to extend the existing 
name:<language> tag to allow an optional suffix of the form 
name:<language>:<country> (or maybe better use 
name:<language>@<country> - since then both suffixes can be optional 
without ambiguity).

-- 
Christoph Hormann
https://www.imagico.de/