[Imports] Birmingham City Council tree import

Andy Mabbett andy at pigsonthewing.org.uk
Tue May 16 11:35:50 UTC 2017


"On 16 May 2017 at 09:44, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 2017-05-15 23:36 GMT+02:00 Andy Mabbett <andy at pigsonthewing.org.uk>:

>> > the point is, while a mapper can use any tags he wants, an import
>> > shouldn't
>> > introduce any new tags but rather use established tags in a way they are
>> > already defined.
>>
>> Where was this "rule" agreed and where is that documented? What is the
>> justification for it?

> it is part of the import guidelines:
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Guidelines#Use_the_right_tags

So that's the documentation; but I also asked "where was this agreed?"
and "What is the justification for it?

What it actually says is:

    Your import should use tags which are familiar to the OSM
    community, rather than inventing its own set of tags.

which I think it is reasonable (and certainly pragmatic) to interpret as:

    Where possible use existing tags; only create new ones if no suitable
    tag already exists

I note that the same section also says:

   You may have some metadata like the IDs used for your original data.
    If this metadata will be useful to OSM, then define your own prefix
    and use that on those metadata tags. The TIGER import for instance
    uses the "tiger:" prefix. The original ID of a TIGER object is tagged as
    "tiger:tlid".

    However, don't go overboard with metadata. OSM is only interested in
    what is verifiable. This doesn't include (for example) foreign keys from
    another database, unless those are absolutely necessary for maintaining
    the data in future.

which would seem to allow the use of a "proprietary" key for filling
stations, as recently discussed.

-- 
Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
http://pigsonthewing.org.uk



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