On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 3:15 AM, Frederik Ramm <frede...@remote.org> wrote:
> On 07/19/2013 03:33 AM, Serge Wroclawski wrote: >>> >>> Of the solutions, I feel that calling it what it's called locally is >>> preferable. Anyone who cares to compare across countries is going to >>> have >>> to parse the location first anyway. >> >> >> We've managed to handle creating definitions that we could use >> worldwide for pretty much everything else, including roads, sports, >> other schools, various amenities, etc. > > Have we really? I did say "pretty much". :) > (A quick count tells me that we have 7941 "bars" and 7209 "cafes" in Italy, > while we have 3330 "bars" and 19319 "cafes" in Germany, this makes it seem > likely that we do indeed use amenity=bar in Italy for things that would not > be called a bar in Germany.) > > Personally I don't think that it would be terribly bad if > amenity=kindergarten would mean something else in the US than in Germany, > for example. > > (I *would* find it strange though if anything from elementary school upwards > would be classed as "childcare" - in my mind, the focus in school is on > teaching something, and the focus in childcare is on supervision. But maybe > that's a cultural bias too?) Comments about the US education system aside, I think that you're touching on an important issue- which is that the tagging system is just there to provide a label. The human-readability aspect of it is nice, but it's not entirely necessary. Just as we don't really expect every single OSM user to understand the English that they're typing in as tags, we can't expect that these words mean the same thing- we just need to define the terms beforehand. And this seems like it's harder than it needs to be, since, as you say, at some point (most) children go to school- that's at around age 6. As for kindergarten, while the name may have an obvious German origin, my question is what the British definition of the word is, since it's British English that we use in OSM as our base language, and does that British definition differ from the US definition. - Serge _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
