Am 10.01.2011 18:11, schrieb Martijn van Exel:
Yes, that is exactly where a semantic layer would come in! For
example, I would tag a feature in a semantics-enabled JOSM in my
native language, Dutch, as "provinciale weg". A lookup in the ontology
would expose an ambiguity: a provincial road could be highway=primary
or highway=secondary, depending on the road number. Human
disambiguation would be required, the attributes of the semantic
relation between 'NL:provinciale weg' and 'highway=primary' and
'highway=secondary' could provide a clue to do this. In other cases,
it could be automated based on the context. For example, if the road
number was already entered by the user.
I think, it's a good idea to think about semantic layers for OSM, but
not for the editing side of the API.
There are a few issues where this would work - like the one you
mentioned, like the translation of highway=living_street to
"Spielstraße" in German or highway=pedestrian to "Fußgängerzone".
But there are a lot of other issues much more complicated - and on top
of that much less unified in meaning.
A lot of threads here, at the tagging mailing list and so on show
problems with the interpretation of a tag - even staying with some
not-absolutely-defined-kind-of English as base language.
If you look at talk-de there are some threads about translation
possibilities for JOSM presets.
I don't remember much issues there where it was perfectly clear how to
translate any tag. Even drinking_water was discussed with multicultural
scope to the definition of what water you can drink (with/without
boiling it before).
I fear, the definition of any "official" layer dealing with the
translation will make these misinterpretations even harder to resolve as
I'm not pushed to think about the meaning of a tag before using it.
Providing something like that as a translation table or multilanguage
ontology is nevertheless a good idea perhaps; to give developers a
starting point for translation of features on the one hand, and for
understanding of the implicit ontology the tagging builds.
regards
Peter
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