Malaysian tagging style: waterways and names

Moving to another tagging aspect. Waterways and names.

I guess there will be not much problems to deal with waterways. However, deep in the paddy fields of the northern states of the peninsular, it may be puzzling to categorise the man-made irrigation system sweeping through the farmlands…

Names however… can be a moot point.

  1. From the Wiki… “the default name, used locally” is stressed.

  2. English names? There’s a name:en tag for that. But for buildings having only English names e.g. Pavilion, 7 Eleven, etc, we’ll go along with its prescribed names.

  3. Places using Chinese or Tamil scripts only? Some points of interests (for example, burial grounds) would display only its Chinese or Tamil name. That perfectly goes into the name=* tag. Of course local people would refer to the place with a local name, so use loc_name=* tag. Or otherwise, the description=* tag is really useful.

  4. Let’s say a place has so much multilingual names. I guess its name in Bahasa Melayu should take precedent - if it has one. Its name in Chinese can be included through name:zh=* or name:zh_pinyin=* (which is it anyway? Or is it name:zh-Latn-pinyin=*?). Actually, what is the tag to represent the names in Tamil script? Couldn’t find any…

  5. Full names and abbreviations. Correct me if I am wrong, but OSM stressed so much to include an element with its full name. All the various short names can be included short_name=* tag. Ok for example, short_name for Sekolah Kebangsaan Padang can be tagged as short_name=SK Padang;SK Pdg.

The tag for a Tamil name is name:ta

In the North, there are some Thai temples which also have Thai names, e.g. https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3278470603. But here, the Thai name was just a transliteration of the Malay (or English? - I won’t expect a difference here) name; so I put the Thai name into name:th, and the other name into name.

In India, the problem with names in different languages is much more common. They suggest the English name to be used in the name tag, see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_India; that’s also commonly used on e.g. road signs.

Abbreviations are another problem: in European languages, the often abbreviated parts are at the end of the name, in Malay/Indonesian at the beginning: Jalan XY - XY Street; Sekolah Kebangsaan XY - XY School etc. Most search algorithms require you to know the start of the name, and now chose between jalan-jln-jn-jl… On the other hand, always starting typing Jalan isn’t nice either, and with the schools it’s annoying.

Got it.

It depends I guess - probably in Perlis, Kedah and Kelantan it would likely be in Malay. Penang, probably in English.

That probably have something to do with Nominatim itself. In Malaysia, the common abbreviation for “Jalan” should be “Jln” or “J”. “Jn” or probably “Jl” is more common in Indonesia I think. So short_name: comes to the rescue.

Again, I will be including this into the Wiki - so far, this is what have I worked on.

I am thinking to open a new forum topic over here. “Translation request” maybe to include multilingual names?