Simon Poole simon@poole.ch writes:
Well I didn't invent the way the names are currently formed and don't really have a strong opinion on the matter. Clearly it is a bit of misuse of the name tab, but it does make the relations easy to find in JOSM.
AFAIK the ref tag has been the only tag that traditionally has been rendered so right now there is no danger of confusion, but we might want to revisit the issue if somebody wants to it differently. A possible compromise would be to leave name as it is, and use name:de, name:fr and name:it for actual rendering of the route name, for which we wouldn't use the plain name tag anyway .
We can not control who is going to render a map and with which rules and styles. The best we can do is to use established tags according to the convention. If there is no sensible value for the name tag I would just leave it out instead of repeating the ref.
The question is naturally where to get the route names in all languages from without referring to the veloland.ch documentation and if SwissMobil claim any IP rights on them (we naturally already have that potential problem).
I doubt a name like "Aare Route" can hold any copyright. And the natural place to get them from are the signs that are posted along the route.
Matthias