[OSM-dev] Standardized feature/tag database idea & proposal

[Frederik Ramm]

Seth,

On 11/15/20 19:14, Seth Deegan wrote:
> Has anyone ever thought of creating an official database that stores all
> of the approved and in-use tags/features in OSM? 

Yes, of course, this idea has been around in a variety of flavours. I
remember a conference talk by David Earl in 2010
(https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/SotM_2010_session:_Tag_Central:_a_Schema_for_OSM)
though even then it was not revolutionary.

I think that going from a wiki to a plain database doesn't actually
solve many problems. Many things that are difficult for people to deal
with - like tag definitions leaving room for interpretation, different
editors having different presets, different language versions describing
tags differently, a lot of vagueness about the proposal process and its
importance, etc.etc. - would not be solved by your idea. You'd only
replace the backend but that would not automatically fix the messy bits
(and for some of the messy bits, "fixing" them might also mean breaking
a part of OSM that many cherish).

For example, one point you mention is that with a database, things could
be somehow "locked", but you're completely ignoring the question of who
would get to lock stuff, who would decide which changes are allowed, and
how this relates to translations, what the appeals process would be
etc.etc. - and *those* are the difficult questions, not the question of
whether I could technically have a mechanism that would restrict editing
to certain people.

And of course, as has been pointed out, the wiki stuff can already be
accessed in a database-like fashion, not only through the data endpoint
but also through the taginfo-wiki SQLite database from
https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/download.

Bye
Frederik

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