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Formatting phone numbers for Australia

於 2018年十二月31日 由 exiyEnglish發表。

I recently took to completing some of the tasks in the one of the challenges on MapRoulette named Phone or fax number is not in international format (Australia).

The purpose of this entry is to detail my findings in undertaking this challenge relating to the formatting of phone numbers in Australia for OpenStreetMap.

ITU-T E.164 phone number formatting

The formatting as defined in the wiki follows this pattern:

+<country code> <area code> <local number>

This is the ITU-T E.123 and the DIN 5008 pattern and is the assumed preferred pattern given the RFC 3966/NANP pattern is parenthesised and provided secondary on the wiki entry, in addition, the NANP pattern refers to North American use.

Country/area codes for Australia

Using information from the Australian Government website and the Wikipedia page titled Telephone numbers in Australia the following was identified as relating to the above pattern:

The country code for Australia is 61 and applies to both phone numbers and mobile numbers.

The area codes are for sets of states in Australia. These are; New South Wales and Australian Capital Territory as 02, Victoria and Tasmania as 03, Queensland as 07, Western Australia, South Australia and Northern Territory as 08 and applies for phone numbers but not mobile numbers.

The area code for mobile numbers is 04 regardless of state.

The leading 0 in each area code is only retained when calling nationally, whereas when calling internationally (as is the practice for the pattern of phone numbers in OpenStreetMap) the leading 0 is left out.

Examples of Australian formatting

For phone numbers:

+61 x xxxx xxxx

For mobile phones:

+61 4xx xxx xxx

I could not find clarification of how mobile numbers need to be formatted, as I could not find any evidence where the area code for mobile numbers is separated from the local number (e.g. +61 4 xxxx xxxx). This is presumably because the mobile area code applies to the whole country and not for individual states. The wiki also states, “[…] area codes should preferably be separated only in countries where they are still used distinctly for domestic calls”.

For free call numbers:

1800 xxx xxx

18 xx xx

Toll free numbers:

1300 xxx xxx

13 xx xx

Premium rate numbers:

1900 xxx xxx

19 xx xx

These numbers are, in most cases, numbers that are not internationally callable. Therefore they can not be appended by the country code like +61. It appears quite prevalent that businesses in Australia use these numbers.

It is also suggested on the OpenStreetMap wiki that for numbers such as these, that they have their ISO 3166-1 code at the end of the key. In this case this would be phone:AU=. Therefore in the tasks that had these types of numbers, I corrected the formatting to follow the examples above and change the tag from phone= to phone:AU=.

It would have perhaps been more useful if the challenge on MapRoulette had described in some kind of detail what to do in cases where the number is not internationally callable to ensure greater consistency. However this may have been intentional, as the aforementioned tag is not official, as stated on the wiki page.

Please comment or message me if I have misinterpreted or I am otherwise potentially incorrect in regards to any of the matters I discussed above. I appreciate any feedback that might help me become a more valuable contributor.

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討論

Warin612018年12月31日 09時14分 發表的評論

The 1800, 1300 and 1900 numbers, as you say, are for national use only. Some of these have alternative numbers for international callers, I’d think those are few and far between. Never seen the phone:*= used … don’t know if it is implemented. I would tend to keep the phone=1800 etc as it is, no country code.

The boundaries between the phone codes don’t always follow the state admin boundaries … so you cannot use that. I don’t know the copyright situation on any published phone code boundaries, go carefully there. It would be OK to use the assumed phone codes in the state capitals and surrounds. Else where knowledge will play a big part in determining the code to use.

The number of people trying to ring Australia from overseas using OSM … extremely small? Consider the usual time differences and an email contact just makes so much sense.

TheSwavu2019年01月 3日 05時40分 發表的評論

I don’t know who set up the MapRoulette challenge but this has been discussed on the talk-au mail list:

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-au/2017-September/011451.html https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-au/2017-September/011465.html

exiy2019年01月 4日 03時07分 發表的評論

Thanks for your comments Warin61 and for your links to the mailing list TheSwavu. I feel a bit silly now about this diary now I’ve read through the WikiProject page for Australia.

Never seen the phone:*= used … don’t know if it is implemented. I would tend to keep the phone=1800 etc as it is, no country code.

This was silly of me, given the phone:*= tag isn’t an official tag. Luckily I hadn’t encountered too many edits where I did this, so reverting my changes should be easy.

I don’t know the copyright situation on any published phone code boundaries, go carefully there.

I’m going to be much more careful about this. The data catalogue page on the wiki that I found has been really useful in this regard.

I don’t know who set up the MapRoulette challenge but this has been discussed on the talk-au mail list

I had not thought about checking the mailing list, so thanks for the links. Thankfully it seems these answers are now on the tagging guidelines page on the wiki.

Warin612019年01月 4日 04時19分 發表的評論

Errr I think I may have put those comments about phone numbers on the Ozwiki… use with caution.

‘Unofficial tags’ get used all the time … as long as there is documentation for them and they are not in conflict with any other tag you should be free to use them, just check that they have some documentation so others can understand what the tag means.

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