[Talk-us] Discardable TIGER tags

Toby Murray toby.murray at gmail.com
Sat Jul 28 08:33:07 BST 2012


Some people may not even be aware of this but JOSM silently discards
the created_by tag if it exists on any object you change and upload to
the API. This tag was deemed unnecessary and counterproductive a long
time ago and this is just a way of cleaning it out of the database as
people edit. Not sure if Potlatch does anything like this.

What do you think about adding a couple of TIGER tags to be silently
dropped? As more attributes get added to things in OSM the tag list
can get kind of big and annoying to look through, especially when some
of them are of no real value. Specifically, I try to always do a
"modified" search in JOSM before I upload and remove the
tiger:separated and tiger:upload_uuid tags from things I have touched.

I believe the tiger:separated tag was set on all residential or higher
roads. 98.6% of the values are "no" and most of them are on minor
streets where it is not really an interesting value. On the remaining
roads it seems, in my experience, to be wrong a majority of the time
anyway. So I see no value in this tag.

I believe Dave Hansen said the UUID tag was useful during the TIGER
import process to verify things and fix problems but I see no value in
it now. It is such a large value that it takes up about 1 GB of space
in the (uncompressed XML) planet file according to my calculations.

As stated above, this would only delete the tags on objects that you
have already modified in some way, not on everything you download.

Are there any other tags that people feel should be automatically
discarded? tiger:tlid and tiger:county seem mildly useful. What about
tiger:cfcc and tiger:source? I don't currently remove those from my
changesets but don't really see too much use for them either. Not
really sure about the zip code tags. They seem like they could be
useful but I am not aware of anything that actually uses them. If
there is agreement, I will submit a patch to the JOSM devs and
reference this thread.

Toby



More information about the Talk-us mailing list