Hi everyone, I'm Brandon, and I'm here to talk about multilingual nametags in the US as well as rendering them with vector tiles. So a preface to my talk, I think that a pessimistic view of OSM and mapping in general is that it flattens surfaces across the world.

So that means that you could go to places as diverse as New York City or somewhere in Indonesia, and the map looks pretty much the same, so you can look here at these images. They all look pretty similar. On the other hand, we know the world is a really diverse place, so we should strive to represent distinct cultural phenomena if possible.

So what's unique about the US and mapping in the US? Well the US has a larger immigrant population than any other country in the world. And immigrants, they often form geographic communities that speak languages that are not English. So just within New York City, there is about 700 or 800 languages that are spoken.

I'm going to focus on one specific community, and that's Manhattan Chinatown. There's an episode of the radio show, This American Life, and it describes the Chinese language names of streets in Chinatown, and they have these very colorful names like Garbage Street or Dead Person Street. And there might be multiple names in use for different Chinese languages as well as

among different communities. However, these names might not be independently verifiable or follow the on the ground rule. There might not be any signage for these names, so it's kind of hard to justify their inclusion in OpenStreetMap. On the other hand, there is phonetic names for many Chinese street names in Chinatown,

and since these are verifiable, these belong to the name zh tag. So I've added a couple of these to OpenStreetMap. There's also chain brands such as Chase Bink or McDonald's that have Chinese signage.

And these are also valid for inclusion in LSM. I think a good guideline is that if a location of multinational brand has prominent localized signage, it should be tagged, but not every Popeyes in the nation needs name zh.

There's also some gotchas, which is that if you're going out and mapping Chinese signs, there's some that go from right to left instead of from left to right. So the logical order of the name will start on the right side. There's also cases where scripts are different. There's a very popular kind of restaurant in New York that's called Lanzhou Handmade Noodle.

And you can see that in some cases, like on the left, it's written with traditional Chinese characters, and then on the right, it's written with simplified Chinese characters. And since neither script has official status in the US, I think these scripts should be preserved by mappers. So just use whatever characters are actually physically on signs for OSM tags.

It does create some challenges for indexing, like if you're searching or geocoding by name, but that can be resolved with different tools. There's also cases where there's three languages on one sign, so you can add even like a Vietnamese tag.

So for rendering multilingual labels, I think vector-based map tiles are ideal, and you can see a demo site that I've made for all the labels I've added to Chinatown. The vector tiles are really great, but how do I use them? By the way, I don't want to use Postgres. It's complicated to set up. And also, how fast do edits appear?

So these are like major problems that are common in vector tiles. So I'm launching a new feature called Protomaps Map Bundles. You can go to this URL and try it out. You can get free downloads for up to 500,000 nodes that just come as maps. And the unique thing is that these map bundles are based on data that's

updated every single minute, so you don't need to wait a week or a month in order for your changes to show up. So here's a quick video of how it works. You can see the world map. You can zoom in on the area that you're working on. You can select either a rectangular bounding box or a polygon.

So let's give this area a name, Chinatown. And within usually 10 to 20 seconds, it will create that map bundle or vector tiles. And these include layers for things like buildings, POIs, parks, that

kind of thing. And I can open this in my terminal. I can just run a demo script, and that will open a web browser that shows my vector tile rendered in the browser. And you can see here that the POIs are right now using just the name tag, which is in English. But I can change the map style. In this case, I'm using tangram.js.

And I can change the text source to be named ZH instead of name. And let's also make the font a little bit bigger. And if I go back and open my demo, and I zoom in to see the POIs. So in this case, I can see that it has all the Chinese names I've added.

So map bundles are built on the OSM Express database, which is an open source project I've been working on. It has automated cartographic generalization, which just means that these tiles are quite well-compressed, especially when you zoom out. There's also a hosted API that is updated less frequently.

So if you're interested in using map bundles more or doing multilingual tagging, you can contact me at brandon.protomaps.com, as well as if you have suggestions on features to add. Thanks.