street names in Israel have several fundamental problems

Mr_Israel and others,
I have published the tool which I used to upload recent street edits. Maybe somebody will find it useful.
In short, tool takes CSV file with id, type and tags columns; downloads nodes/ways/relations from OSM, and applies tag values from CSV onto downloaded data. As result - you’ll get regular .osm file which may be reviewed and uploaded using JOSM.
All source code and link to the compiled application are here: https://github.com/yrtimiD/osm-bulk-tools

Wow… doesn that mean that I have to upload the new tables from now on by myself ? :slight_smile:

But in my opinion you should open a new thread about your tool. It may interesting to others not following this thread.

Oh yes, now all credit of changes will belong to you only :slight_smile:

I want to little test it here, and if all goes good - I’ll repost in in the other thread.

I have done today my first bulk upload and it seems like everything went fine:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/changeset/14676351

It was very easy to handle, two feedbacks so far:

  1. “Geting next 100 Ways from the API” => “Getting”

  2. It would be great to get a kind of status how many lines are left (example: Getting next 100 Ways from the API - 500 left)

Fixed. Thanks!

New version works fine and its really nice to know how much will follow.
Thank you.

The first 12.000 streets are adjusted.
10.000 streets have to follow…

The first 13.000 streets are adjusted.

topics to discuss:

Haim, Hayim, Chaim
Zion, Tsion, Tsiyon
HaRav, HaRabi, HaRabbi
etc…

What should be the standard for the name:en tag.
I’m never deleting values, only putting them as name:en1, name:en2 etc.
But we should decide what the standard name tag should be.

May be we can try to collect statistics of usage and drop most uncommon variants?

Maybe…

I just dont want a situation where somebody will claim that I prefered the Haim variation over the Hayim, but this is wrong.
As I understood in the last month there is no right and wrong in street name translation.

We just have to make it somehow a equal experience to search for street names in OSM for Israel.

Small update. As I included the tertiary streets the all over named street value is now around 30.000.

I have processed only around half of it (Aleph till Het).
It takes a lot of time to work over the streets.

Beside that I can see that our over all named street value is growing around 100 - 200 streets a month.
So every month there is more new gaps in the old data :slight_smile:

@Mr_Israel, each time you do extracts into google docs - please share them. Additional pair of eyes will never harm (in most cases :slight_smile: )

I can’t do that share every time. This is simply not possible time wise.
You can’t edit details and then wait some days before uploading. Meanwhile there could be changes on this data.

But what we can do is uploading a current view on the data as it is from 1 - 15.000

This could help find issues and discuss next steps.

As I continue working on the streets naming of Israel I discover more and more issues we have at the moment.

Example A:
Sometimes with ‘’ sometimes in Hebrew with only one ’
As we should have a standard way to define it we need declare how the standard should be.

ירושליים
ירושלים

Example B:
The Hebrew letter צ is translated in OSM every time fully different. I don’t want to remove any variation but we should use the same way for the “name:en” tag

צבי => Tsvi or Zvi or Tzvi

Example C:
Two Hebrew letters can be translated in several ways כ and ח makes the translation look very unconsistance.

לכיש Lachish or Lakhish or Lahish

Example D:
כרמל => Carmel or Karmel

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If you have an idea or you want to create a kind of guide you are very welcome.
I’m not that good in Hebrew to take over those questions.

I have gone through the rest of thousands of streets and finished the review of more than 33.000 streets.
So there should be a very very minimum amount of non translated streets left now.

Finally this is done.

Maybe we can take a look on the result and have some translation guidelines?

I hope it’s not too late to contribute to the topic.

The official rules for transliterating Hebrew names to Latin letters is published by the Hebrew Academy - האקדמיה ללשון עברית:
http://hebrew-academy.huji.ac.il/hahlatot/TheTranscription/Documents/ATAR1.pdf

The rules simply replace every consonant and vowel with one or two Latin letters.

There are additional rules for דגש חזק, the use of capital letters, אותיות השימוש, the use of an apostrophe ('), and the use of English translation for common words like Street, boulevard, Junction, interchange, and Port.

Note that these are transliteration rules, not translation rules. Nevertheless, the rules encourage the use of traditional foreign names, such as Mt. Zion (rather than Mt. Tziyon) and Herzl St.(rather than Hertzel St.). Therefore, we should use Carmel rather than Karmel. A ministerial committee has approved a list of places that appears to be a list of exceptions or places that had ambiguous names to be resolved.

For the sake of completeness, I’d like to say that there is also another source which I found to be unreliable as far as the English names are concerned. The Central Bureau of Statistics - הלשכה המרכזית לסטטסטיקה - published a list of places at http://www.cbs.gov.il/ishuvim/ishuvim_main.htm. IMO, the English names are incompatible with neither of the aboveץ For example: ELAT for אילת, EN KARMEL for עין כרמל. It’s not even consistent within itself - it has Both EN and EIN for places starting with עין…

Great contribution.

We are just starting to take care of street names.
I went over all street names and took care of missing once and made the street names more equal without loosing any kind of translation.

Now its time to get deeper into this and define rules that will make translation of street name easier and understandable for English speakers that benefit the most.

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Here is the link to the newest streetnames of Israel.

https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0BzoRSMeOZcXDZ3dNLXJBWENKQ3M/edit?usp=sharing

They are splittet into 3 files as Google Drive is not able to work with too big files.
You are welcome to change names. Just be aware that this will really effect street names later on.

One question bother me a long time: should I put “Boulevard” or “Avenue” in name:en instead of transliterated word “Sderot”?
And if yes, which one?

Good question.

But the question should be, should we translate the sounding or the correct name.
Same goes for Sderot, Kikar, Beit Sefer, Kwish etc.

Despite the fact that “Sderot” and “Kikar” can be found on official road signs, I’m pretty sure that these words absolutely meaningless to the english language readers. So, I’d prefer to translate all translatable.

According to The Hebrew Academy, it is preferred (yet up to the transliteration bodies) to use translation rather than transliteration for general words that are used in their usual dictionary form. It gives a few examples like “רחוב, שדרה, צומת, מחלף, נמל” that would use the English words.

I propose we follow their recommendation and use “St.”, “Blv.”, “Jct.”, “Sq.”, “Rd.”, “Interchange”, and “Port”. I also propose to prefer “Blv.” for “שדרה” rather than “Ave.”, unless the actual signs put by the local officials say differently.

Nothe that the Academy’s suggestion does not apply for words that are part of the name. Their example is to use “Giv’at Ye’arim” rather than “Ye’arim Hill” or “Forests Hill”.

Also, once we agree, it would be good to add the recommendation to the Israeli wiki page