[RFC] Feature Proposal - coat of arms

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

@wolfgang8

Interesting question - is coat_of_arms:=* a valid tagging on boundaries?

From my point of view, coat of arms are identifiers like written names, so yes, I think it’s a valid combination.

Well, I suppose that its validity depends on this proposal. The proposal to set the value to a URL pointing to an image of the coat of arms. This immediately raises some technical issues:

• Can the image be hosted on any arbitrary website, or only Wikimedia Commons? Most data consumers would be averse to displaying an image from anywhere on the Internet, due to the risk of a security vulnerability, domain squatting leading to inappropriate imagery, etc.
• In some jurisdictions, such as the United Kingdom, official coats of arms can be copyrighted. Commons can only host openly licensed images, such as a reproduction of a coat of arms that someone has drawn from scratch based on the heraldic description; typically, this representation visually differs from the original.
• Commons often hosts a given coat of arms as multiple files in different formats. The proposal cites a PNG, which is tagged as needing conversion to SVG. What if an SVG is also available? What if the SVG is cruder or doesn’t render well in some browsers?

@Nikolaus_Weingartmair

The goal is to add a tag for coat of arms to all austrian municipality which have one.

With a key named as generically as coat_of_arms, it’s bound to be used by others well beyond Austria, and on other kinds of features. After all, municipalities aren’t the only entities that can be granted arms. Why not a country, a school, a diocesan cathedral, or the residence of a politician?

In some countries, there’s technically no such thing as an official coat of arms. In Munich’s town hall, there is a display of the coats of arms of Munich’s sister cities. Cincinnati (United States) and Sapporo (Japan) don’t have coats of arms, so it depicts their seals instead:

File:Münchens Partnerstädte.jpg

Perhaps we could waive this distinction and allow seals and emblems too. On second thought, some cities are rather lacking in artistic talent; they’ve adopted logo-like emblems that would make KFC’s Colonel Sanders blush.

@Nikolaus_Weingartmair

My personal use case is to use the images in an application as an icon. The tag could simplify the access to coat of arms for a certain region as the access is way easier on osm than on wikipedia/wikidata. This could benefit other people.

Perhaps you could provide more details about how you’re building your application – what languages or frameworks you’re using. With that information, the community here would be able to help you come up with a straightforward way to associate the boundary relations with Commons image URLs. There are a lot of APIs and tools for working with Wikidata or Commons that wouldn’t require manually tagging OSM elements and wouldn’t require a complicated tag voting process.