[OSM-dev] api0.6 - only one value per key?

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Andreas Kalsch wrote:
> As far as I know, the project to read map features from Wiki pages is 
> the first thing which tries to include sematics for tags. 

Well, strictly speaking the tag semantics are there, in the Wiki, 
expressed in natural language. There are some efforts to machine-read 
this and they are successful where they just need simple "is there/is 
not there" lists but that's about it.

There is a group of people playing with using "Semantic MediaWiki" but 
this is much more than "reading map features from Wiki pages" - it means 
replacing the Wiki software altogether by something which is likely to 
consume more resources than we have ;-)

> The current 
> OSM data model does not include any semantics for tags, does it?

The data model doesn't, and will probably never. The OSM database is 
meant to be as "content agnostic" as possible; it only performs the most 
basic integrity checks and has no concept of what "makes sense" and what 
not. It is the job of the database users to decide what makes sense to 
them (and ideally, only store things that make sense).

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"