On Wed, 01 Aug 2012 19:48:37 John Sturdy wrote: > > [1] > > http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Names_localization > > +1, generally; but I'm not keen on deprecating the bare "name=*" tag, > because for many (perhaps most) named features, there is only one > name. For example, a minor rural road in England will probably have a > name (in English), but it won't have names in other languages, and > no-one will really describe its name as "its English name" --- it's > simply "its name". Multiple names are really an issue for > multilingual countries and for major features (typically large cities, > rivers, and perhaps mountains) in monolingual countries, and I suspect > those are well under half of all the features that will ever be > mapped.
I like the proposal in general, but I don't think it's necessary to introduce a lang=* tag, and I don't think we should lose the name=* tag. It's also not true that in a 'monolingual' country that there is only one name for something. For example, London is 'London' to a British person, but 'Londres' to a French person. I still think it's simple enough to have name=* to be the 'default' name you get if you don't specify a language, or the name you get if your selected language is not available. For example, for London: name=London name:en=London name:fr=Londres Then a person requesting a French version of the map would see 'Londres', but a person requesting the German version would see 'London'. If no language is specified a person would see 'London'. A simple algorithm can also make bilingual maps by concatenating tags, i.e. "name:xx (name:yy)" and making sensible decisions if name:xx=* or name:yy=* is missing, or if name=* contains name:xx=* or name:yy=* (such as in Japan or Korea where name=* contains Japanese (or Korean) followed by English in brackets). Best wishes, Andrew _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
