Hi, I am not a OSM contributor but a frequent user of OSM. Recently my project needs the shire and city data in Victoria, Australia, but I notice that the naming methods of these shires and cities in Victoria are not consistent. Most of the shires and cities are named by “Shire of …” or “City of …”, while others have different naming method like “Surf Cost Shire” or “Latrobe City”. I cannot find the exact “Latrobe City” by searching “City of Latrobe”. I wonder if somebody could standardize the naming method of the shires and cities in Victoria so that researchers using OSM can have an easier time looking up the data. Here are the cities or shires that are not named in the form of “Shire of …” or “City of …”:
Surf Coast Shire
Bass Coast Shire
Goldren Plains Shire
Latrobe City
Thank you for reading my message. Have a nice day.
They should be named as usually signposted, this can vary between LGAs, one might mostly use X Shire the other might mostly use Shire of X, it would be wrong to make them all consistent just for the sake of it as then the data wouldn’t reflect reality.
There is a well defined tag short_name https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:name which is appropriate here and might help you. eg. Surf Coast Shire would have short_name=Surf Coast, Latrobe City would have short_name=Latrobe.
@aharvey
I think the tag will definitely be helpful in my case. Thank you for your reply and the suggestions!