Name tag abuse
For a long time i observe people abusing the name tag for all kinds of
descriptions, refs etc. Whenever there is no matching tag for putting a string
the name tag gets used.
IMHO the name tag should really only carry names not object descriptions. A
kindergarten should carry the tag amenity=kindergarten not
name=Kindergarten. The name tag should really only contain the name.
There is no real way to actually clean this up or detect name abuse automatically.
As i wanted to learn C++ (beeing a C and Perl programmer) i started to play with libosmium a little and got my way to write a name tag extractor for a given pbf file.
git clone git://pax.zz.de/nameextract
Most likely the C++ code is horrible by coding standards but its the result of a single day starting to get my way into C++.
nameextract will parse the pbf file with the help of libosmium and
dump a unordered list of name tags and the objects e.g. N4711 and W0815 for
nodes and ways carrying that specific name. ne2html will format that output a
little nicer with HTML so can open it with a browser and use the links for JOSM
remote control or opening the object on the OpenStreetMap website.
I did so for parts of Ostwestfalen-Lippe and you'll wonder how often there is a name tag with a single digit number value.
Some extracts with data of today: