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Add Nominatim description terms

Open spixi opened this issue 1 month ago • 5 comments

Adds the following Nominatim terms to make them translatable

  • boundary.low_emission_zone
  • boundary.postal_code
  • boundary.public_transport
  • boundary.timezone
  • landuse.highway (this refers to "highway" with the meaning of roadway in general (German: "Fahrbahn"), not to freeway/speedway (German: "Autobahn"))
  • railway.crossing (not to be confused with highway.crossing, which may be translated completely differently, e. g. German highway.crossing = "Kreuzung", but railway.crossing = "Bahnübergang")
  • historic:monastery

spixi avatar Nov 16 '25 23:11 spixi

@spixi - I'm not sure if reviewers received notifications after your latest changes, so I'm going to use this comment for a ping and a summary.

After the latest changes, the current version of this PR offers the following contested values:

public_transport: "Public Transportation District"
highway: "Road Right of Way"
crossing: "Railway-Path Crossing"

I'm going to leave this discussion to the experts :slightly_smiling_face:

pablobm avatar Nov 24 '25 12:11 pablobm

There’s some further discussion in the threads above. Coming up with a good label for highway is proving more difficult than I thought at first, but the public_transport label seems OK to me.

1ec5 avatar Nov 24 '25 19:11 1ec5

public_transport: "Public Transportation District"
highway: "Road Right of Way"

These two are both fine for American-English, but sound very weird to British-English ears. We don't have an equivalent term to "Right of Way" as used by Americans. Additionally, "Right of Way" has a distinct meaning in the UK, which is related to access rights and not landuse.

crossing: "Railway-Path Crossing"

I'd either accept this as-is, or use "Pedestrian Railway Crossing" (i.e. using Pedestrian as a modifier to the term general term Railway Crossing).

In summary, I'm fine to merge these as en.yml can tolerate Americanisms and us Brits just need to rely on en-GB.yml fixing such things :smile:

gravitystorm avatar Dec 03 '25 18:12 gravitystorm

highway: "Road Right of Way"

I'd like to make a plead again here for using OSM English for the default 'en' terms. If Americanisms are required, they should go into 'en-US'. As a fairly fluent non-native speaker I wouldn't have the faintest idea what a "Road Right Of Way" might be. As a fairly fluent OSMer, I wouldn't even start to guess that this might relate to a landuse. Something to do with access tags seems more likely.

The equivalent landuse=railway seems to go with just 'Railway'. So for consistency, landuse=highway should be just 'Highway'? It's the same concept. A cleared but more verbose version would be 'Land used by Roads/Railways'.

lonvia avatar Dec 04 '25 09:12 lonvia

As I said above, I’m fine with using an alternative “OSM English” term for landuse=highway. Also fine with putting “right of way” in an en-US localization. But that’s two things that don’t exist yet…

If we’re OK with it saying “Highway”, then that’s already the behavior in English, though this would give other localizations an opportunity to translate it to OSM Italian, OSM Thai, etc. Most likely they’d translate it literally. It would likely appear next to the result for the roadway, so a search for a street or an actual highway (e.g., Autobahn) could get confusing.

Highway Tudor Close, Residential Road Tudor Close Highway Tseung Lam Highway, Primary Road Tseung Lam Highway

“Road Reservation” is the other option I floated. It sounds very British, but it’s actually an Americanism. 🤔

1ec5 avatar Dec 05 '25 05:12 1ec5