[Osmf-talk] Tagging standards

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 20.10.22 10:59, Shawn K. Quinn wrote:
> I don't see what's wrong with:
> 
> amenity=cafe
> takeaway=only
> 
> in this case.

I do see what is wrong with that. We're going around telling everyone 
how great OSM is, how liberating and how they can finally map their own 
area themselves without being limited by whatever big business thinks a 
map should be -

and then we tell them "no, your bar is really a cafe", just so that 
someone who doesn't know shit about Italy can still use their hipster 
coffee app (which doesn't know shit about Italy) to find the nearest 
coffee place.

I'm a computer nerd myself and I know where the desire for 
standardisation comes from. Make the world machine-readable and we can 
do so many cool things, yay!

But there is a form of colonialism in this "making the world 
machine-readable", because who decides what the machine can read?

In my eyes, the Italians should be free to record their bars as bars. 
And then an Italian person can search for the nearest "bar", knowing 
that they will get a coffee there (a "normal coffee" by the way, which 
in many other countries would be called an "espresso"). Yes, this makes 
everything more complicated, and there will be the odd Italian in Paris 
who stands before a closed bar at 8am wondering where to get his coffee, 
but that's diversity for you. Hitting everything with the Global Unified 
Tagging Hammer to abstract from cultural differences is, in my opinion, 
a misguided attempt to streamline the world into an easy 
computer-readable landscape.

The "Italian bar" example is an obvious one but there will be many more 
and subtler differences. Every person in Iceland knows that they will be 
able to get hot soup at a gas station, but do we therefore have to add 
an amenity=fast_food, cuisine=soup to all of them just to that a 
foreigner doesn't have to learn that fact? Dumb down every aspect of 
local culture everywhere, for the benefit of the unified global 
culture-indifferent navigation app?

Bye
Frederik

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