"Dear Frederik, First of all, thanks for bringing the topic here, as I was in the mailing thread from the beginning of the discussion. According to your response, I would like to highlight some specific points.
1. First of all, you have pointed to the wrong direction of the overall conversation. The group that you are recognizing as the academic or elite group is trying to put emphasis on maintaining a coordinated data input structure! From the very beginning, it has been discussed that adding local language is not a problem, the issue is which structure it is to be followed that was supposed to be discussed with the local OSM community! Over around 7 years, a data input eco-system has been maintained and on a sudden one can not break that structure without discussion. 2. The group you are mentioning as academic people all the time, that is the group who works in the ground! And the group you are mentioning as minority group here, that is the academic group who are just translating the data in local official language that is already in the OSM platform. They are not data contributors, rather than creating a messy situation to the data level just by translating using google translator, which is not at all a good practice! 3. You have told about name use cases and indicated that you have not seen any real-life use cases of name tagging of English. The question remains where you have checked those data. Have you checked any Mapillary or osm cam photo in the capital city area for the naming practice? 4. Always a common complaint comes in front that what is the data quality in OSM that one should deploy a project based on OSM. Yes, it is true to say, in the developing zones; projects carried out by different organizations are the main source of data that are found in OSM in those areas. The community that you are recognizing as academic trying to gain trust from different governmental and non-governmental institutions to run projects on OSM so that the data can be enriched! If any uncoordinated event happens like this all the time, they will not take it as a safe place to provide data and run projects on it. Afterall its the data that matters not any utopian concept! 5. As a core member of OSM have you noticed the changes in the data set that is taking place over time in that region? What was the situation of OSM dataset now and then, what is the changing pattern, who are the people behind that? Those people who have brought the platform to such an extent, I don't think they have done it for postering themselves! If you think OSM platform does not need that kind of contributors, rather prefer the activities of some people then I think it's ok for those contributors not to continue the journey! 6. As an OSM contributor, from my point; we need the use cases of data, a sustainable way of gathering data that should be coordinated! Where the group started the communication to get minimize the issue regarding the name tagging issue but all the time main topic of the discussion has always been ignored or just skimmed through! 7. When someone adds data in any data collecting app, what is the common practice to add those data even for the local people for that region? Maybe I've become explicit in many cases, but that's true! Developing a large amount of data set requires lots of hard work and involves so many people. And when just someone comes up and starts translating the original data even without discussion then that's become really upsetting. The group you are calling as academic, they are also from the local community who has developed such a large dataset; don't you think that they love and respect their mother tongue! I hope everybody will get my point. Best regards Sajjad Hossen On Thu, Nov 28, 2019, 8:11 PM John Whelan <jwhelan0...@gmail.com> wrote: > The way I would approach this professionally would be to define the > requirements first. > > In this case we have a requirement to display the name in the language of > choice. > > We also have a requirement to be compatible with existing software. > > Pragmatically I would recommend changing the name field to use only an 8 > bit Latin alphabet character set recognizing that not all systems can > handle more complex character sets. Which precise character set should be > chosen would a be subject for discussion but either ISO-8859-1 or Windows-1252 > would be contenders. My personal preference would be the ISO standard. > > Unicode is nice but we managed with 6 bit character sets for many years > when I started with computers. Even accented characters were a major > problem. Also remember that .OSM data is in XML format and XML came out of > SGML which was first used to transmit documents over modems so only 7 bits > where available for encoding characters. The extended characters use a > special escape code sequence to hold the unicode characters. > > Realistically software never wears out but source code gets lost. > Compilers and operating systems get updated. It may not be possible to > modify existing software to handle unicode characters. I have a perfectly > good scanner sitting in the corner that no long can be used with Win 10 > because of a new and improved driver. With the OpenStreetMap environment > there isn't even a way to get a complete list of software that uses the > OpenStreetMap data so it can be tested. > > The local language can be added in a name: then software that can handle > the local names can pick it up. Osmand etc. can be configured to use the > local name transparently so the local population can use it in the language > of their choice. > > This approach would appear to meet the requirements. The argument that we > should change all the existing software to meet a requirement that was not > clearly defined when the software was written doesn't make sense to me. > > Cheerio John > > Frederik Ramm wrote on 2019-11-28 3:25 AM: > > John, > > On 28.11.19 01:40, John Whelan wrote: > > Is there any reason why name:en could not be used? > > > The country's official language requires a "non-standard" font to be > available which does not seem to be a given on all platforms. Like if > you set up a standard tile server and don't install extra fonts you will > see little squares instead of place names all over China. > > Apparently not all applications are as good in name:xx handling as > OsmAnd. A recurring point in the discussion is that the proponents of > using the official language say "we shouldn't fall back to English name > tags just because some apps/web sites are broken, we should file bug > reports with them instead", and the proponents of using English say > "let's be pragmatic, there's no way all these apps/sites will be fixed > within a short time, so we should use English". > > Bye > Frederik > > > > -- > Sent from Postbox <https://www.postbox-inc.com> > _______________________________________________ > HOT mailing list > HOT@openstreetmap.org > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/hot >
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