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 [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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