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<p>I have striven mightily to stay out of this discussion because it
is such a can of worms, and much of the heated rhetoric strikes at
the heart of the OSM philosophy many of you so painstakingly
spelled out to me a few years ago. Nevertheless, I want to make a
couple of points, then duck behind my desk before the tomatoes
start flying.</p>
<p>WRT Frederik's point,<br>
</p>
<p>
<blockquote type="cite">I do see what is wrong with that. We're
going around telling everyone <br>
how great OSM is, how liberating and how they can finally map
their own <br>
area themselves without being limited by whatever big business
thinks a <br>
map should be - and then we tell them "no, your bar is really a
cafe"...</blockquote>
the point strikes me as an effort to differentiate between objects
we can all agree to define in the same way (e.g., building=retail,
highway=service) and objects that are highly localized and can be
safely defined in accordance with local customs and the advice to
travelers you can obtain from Lonely Planet guidebooks. As someone
who has traveled widely over a Foreign Service career spanning
four decades, and who made his first foreign trip (solo!) at age
17 nearly 50 years ago, I can attest that not having full
information on whether a "bar" serves coffee early in the morning
can be a surprise but is scarcely catastrophic or overly
traumatic. It's a learning experience, and leads to greater
sophistication. <br>
</p>
<p>Under no circumstances should we ever ban or discourage
innovation in tagging, since the world is scarcely static, and no
predefined tagging scheme could conceivably encompass every
contingency. I innovated tags while mapping Turkmenistan, in cases
where no existing tag fit, so have sympathy for that point of
view.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That said, there is a case to be made (as several of you
privately made to me when I was on the OSMF Board of Directors)
for a subset of tags that are widely agreed to and "curated".
Exactly where the boundaries of that subset would be placed would
be highly debatable and if anybody ever grasps the nettle, starts
to work on a tag curation proposal in earnest, I fully expect the
debate to be white hot. Nevertheless, creating a relatively small
subset of curated tags that the vast majority of us agree on is an
idea that bears merit, particularly in the eyes of those of us who
struggled to produce maps from datasets with object tagging that
defied all logic or commonality with the rest of the data.
Defining that subset could make good use of input from our growing
network of local chapters and communities, for as Frederik
correctly points out, OSM should not seek unduly to constrain how
local mappers map their own communities, and the local chapters
and communities can help inform the identification of universal
tags not requiring localized definitions.</p>
<p>I'll go hide now so you can throw tomatoes at me.</p>
<p>cheers,<br>
apm<br>
</p>
<p>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2022 13:08:25 +0200
From: Frederik Ramm <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:frederik@remote.org"><frederik@remote.org></a>
To: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated moz-txt-link-freetext" href="mailto:osmf-talk@openstreetmap.org">osmf-talk@openstreetmap.org</a>
Subject: Re: [Osmf-talk] Tagging standards
Message-ID: <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:d9a50f51-5850-df6b-08b8-7ef6305b93c4@remote.org"><d9a50f51-5850-df6b-08b8-7ef6305b93c4@remote.org></a>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Hi,
On 20.10.22 10:59, Shawn K. Quinn wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite" style="color: #007cff;">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">I don't see what's wrong with:
amenity=cafe
takeaway=only
in this case.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">I do see what is wrong with that. We're going around telling everyone
how great OSM is, how liberating and how they can finally map their own
area themselves without being limited by whatever big business thinks a
map should be -
and then we tell them "no, your bar is really a cafe", just so that
someone who doesn't know shit about Italy can still use their hipster
coffee app (which doesn't know shit about Italy) to find the nearest
coffee place.
I'm a computer nerd myself and I know where the desire for
standardisation comes from. Make the world machine-readable and we can
do so many cool things, yay!
But there is a form of colonialism in this "making the world
machine-readable", because who decides what the machine can read?
In my eyes, the Italians should be free to record their bars as bars.
And then an Italian person can search for the nearest "bar", knowing
that they will get a coffee there (a "normal coffee" by the way, which
in many other countries would be called an "espresso"). Yes, this makes
everything more complicated, and there will be the odd Italian in Paris
who stands before a closed bar at 8am wondering where to get his coffee,
but that's diversity for you. Hitting everything with the Global Unified
Tagging Hammer to abstract from cultural differences is, in my opinion,
a misguided attempt to streamline the world into an easy
computer-readable landscape.
The "Italian bar" example is an obvious one but there will be many more
and subtler differences. Every person in Iceland knows that they will be
able to get hot soup at a gas station, but do we therefore have to add
an amenity=fast_food, cuisine=soup to all of them just to that a
foreigner doesn't have to learn that fact? Dumb down every aspect of
local culture everywhere, for the benefit of the unified global
culture-indifferent navigation app?
Bye
Frederik
<div class="moz-txt-sig">--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated moz-txt-link-freetext" href="mailto:frederik@remote.org">frederik@remote.org</a> ## N49?00'09" E008?23'33"</div></pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
</p>
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