On 04/09/2012 15:30, Phil! Gold wrote:
I fully agree that there's no way to set a global standard; it should be
left to the locals, who know the features best.
But how local is local? It's obvious that a single standard for the
whole world is not going to happen, but there has to be some level at
which standardisation is a "good thing". If individual mappers set their
own standards, with no regard for their neighbours, we will have total
anarchy and useless data. Somewhere between those two extremes there has
to be a place for some "guidance".
Many things have multiple names according to the context (official,
signed, colloquial etc). Look at the use of language variants: different
versions of the same data can be tagged easily by appending a context
identifier (in this case a language code). But there can still only be
one default as indicated in e.g. name=*. Renderers need to be in a
position to choose whether to display the official name of a city, or
the short name, or the colloquial name or whatever. If a renderer has no
way of knowing what type of name is indicated by name=*, the finished
map will be an inconsistent mess. The proper solution is IMHO that the
renderers can rely on some kind of standards, based on explicit tags for
the different types of names and giving plain old "name=*" a lower
priority than the explicit type of name it is looking for. It must be
possible, based on the tagging and the "territory"(i.e. country, state,
county???) for a data consumer to obtain directly or to derive what it
needs. Losing the usage context for a name is like lossy audio
compression. Once the detail is lost, it's gone for ever. We already tag
names in multiple languages, so the renderer can choose which version to
use. There is plenty of discussion about which value goes in plain
"name=*" of course.
<armour flameproof="yes">
We can avoid the whole problem by deprecating the plain "name" tag, thus
forcing every name to be labelled with a language. Same for rivers and
admin areas - forget name, only use official_name, short_name, loc_name
etc etc. with defined and documented semantics, which may vary by
"territory", in combination with a language code.
</armour>
Colin
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