Martijn van Exel <m <at> rtijn.org> writes: >The user would be able to tag a feature with "chemist", >"pharmacy", "farmacia or "apotheek" and that would result in the same >coding in the OSM database (currently: shop=chemist).
Rather than typing in the name and hoping that it matches in the translation layer, it would be better for the user to select it from a list. It then becomes an ordinary localization problem. If the OSM editor program has a set of choices with user-visible text for each, then existing translation services such as Launchpad Translations can be used to localize them to different languages. >When consuming >OSM data, the process could be reversed; based on the locale, a >feature tagged "shop=chemist" could (would) be output as being one of >these culturally determined Things. Note that a "chemist", a >"pharmacy", a "farmacia" and an "apotheek" are names for something >that is similar across cultures and languages, but not literally the >same. I don't fully understand what you mean. If it all gets tagged the same way on the map then a client program cannot distinguish between the German apothecary and the Spanish pharmacy. It would just be a language lookup and not a culturally determined difference. A residential street is not literally the same across cultures either, but the different kinds have enough in common that they can all be tagged the same way. So I expect most amenities would be like that too. >The idea is to *avoid* having different classifications on the >database level, even though one concept could be represented by two >different names in one language (consider freeway / highway). >Any ambiguity arising from that would have to be handled by additional >attributes. This sounds very sensible and I think it is mostly the situation we have now. What you are proposing is a more friendly interface to the OSM tags for non- English speakers, rather than a change to the way tagging is done. Is that so? -- Ed Avis <e...@waniasset.com> _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
