Hi Andrew,
Is there a well defined right/wrong for names with - in them.
Simple but important: no. At least not for the whole of Switzerland. There are only "guidelines"[1] that a city can follow. These lists are made by the Swiss postal services and have no official character.
In Basel we have:
4052 St.-Alban-Anlage 4052 St.-Alban-Berg 4052 St.-Alban-Kirchrain 4052 St.-Alban-Rheinweg 4052 St.-Alban-Ring 4052 St.-Alban-Tal 4052 St.-Alban-Talstrasse 4052 St.-Alban-Vorstadt
Looking at OSM it is mostly the same. However St.-Alban-Berg is currently tagged as St. Albanberg.
The St. Alban-question is actually quite tricky, as St. Alban is the name of a quarter in Basel.
In all the 'official' maps I've seen and on the websites[2], the Streets are written without a hyphen between St. and Alban. It even seems that on the streetsigns it's written without a space[3]
The guidelines however suggest that they should be written as in the list above.
As with the '-Berg' or 'berg', I could imagine situations, where 'St. Albanberg' would be correct, but it seems that in Basel it's '-Berg'.
Also, are there any rules about umlauts at the beginning of names? As a none-native speaker, i've noticed that often names which should start with an umlaut are generally written using Ae, Oe, etc. Again, a few examples from Basel is 4055 Oekolampadstrasse, 4057 Oetlingerstrasse. However, not being a native speaker, i've no idea if this is right/wrong.
For Umlauts, there's not even a guideline. :) (Only that a city should use the same rule for all their streets.)
P.S. Anybody actually in Basel and can check Oekolampadstrasse. OSM currently has Oekolompadstrasse, which might be a typo.
[I belive that it's allowed to look up such questions in official sources such as http://www.stadtplan.bs.ch/geoviewer/ )
There is an Oekolampad-Church[4] in Basel, so the street name most probably is with an 'a'.
Regards, Thomas
[1] a good starting point (in Germand) would be http://gis.hsr.ch/wiki/Schreibweise_von_Strassennamen
[2] eg. the address on http://www.gd.bs.ch/
[3] http://maps.google.ch/?q=Basel&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Basel,+Basel-St...