[josm-dev] Taginfo integration

Jochen Topf jochen at remote.org
Sun Sep 14 08:04:31 UTC 2014


Hi!

Taginfo (taginfo.osm.org) has the "mission" of aggregating all information
about OSM tag usage and present it to the users. As a part of this, taginfo
has parsed the JOSM style config files for a long time to present infos
like this: http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/highway#josm .

A few weeks back JOSM changed its config files and the parser broke. Since
then this data has been static.

I always wanted to extend this to other editors and other uses of OSM tags,
in maps, routers, etc. But I have realized over time that that approach
doesn't scale. I can't parse everybodies config file (or look at the source
code of all these projects) to see which tags are used how. And I can't
keep up with the changes.

So I changed the approach: Instead of taginfo having to understand all the
different formats, I created one simple format in which all projects can
report to taginfo which tags they are using. The projects generate either
automatically or manually (or both) a .json file that taginfo pulls in
daily and integrates into its database.

Currently this setup is in beta test. You can see it at work at
http://mercator.openstreetmap.de/projects (or the "behind-the-scenes-look
at http://mercator.openstreetmap.de/projects"). Or, for instance, the
info about the highway key here:
http://mercator.openstreetmap.de/keys/highway#projects

I have copied over some JOSM infos from the old setup into the new, just to
show how it could look. But that is just for the beta test. If JOSM wants to
show up in taginfo in the future, you'll have to create this json file and
give me the URL. A documentation of the format is in the wiki:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Taginfo/Projects . The format is
intentionally simple and can't reflect all the nuances of the tag usage.
I see it more as a way to *find* information about tag usage then to
directly present all of it. That's why there are links back to the project.

I'd be glad if you can provide such a project file. I don't know enough about
the innards of JOSM, maybe it should be more that one file, one for core
JOSM, one for each style, maybe one for each plugin? We have to try this
out and can start small and extend this over time.

I have not released this taginfo feature yet, because I want to get feedback
from you and others. If you have ideas about the file format, or the
presentation or other aspects of this feature please tell me.

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf  jochen at remote.org  http://www.jochentopf.com/  +49-721-388298



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