[Osmf-talk] Tagging standards

[john whelan]

I think it is fair to say to mappers if you'd like your mapping to be
rendered in the mainstream renders then the following "tier one" tags
should be used with the proviso that there are regional differences and
interpretations which should be respected.

This doesn't imply these are the only tags that must be used but rather see
if one of these tags would work first.

Some tags such as traffic_signals have a safety aspect to them, some the
type of coffee bean used at 8 am in a bar although extremely important to
some including those with a coffee mug that says put it down on the desk
then back away slowly are possibly more open to regional interpretation.

I think one implication that is not often considered is the effect of
changing tag values.  In Canada we have community mail boxes, these were
originally tagged CBM, the wiki then recommended they be tagged another
value and currently there is a move afoot to change this to yet another
value.  This effectively means changes are required to the rendering
systems.  Stability helps end users.

The original post was intended for OSM-talk, I blame my smartphone for
correcting the address.  I'm not advocating for completely standardised
tags but neither do I think each mapper should have their own completely
independent set of tags.  The map functions better with some degree of
cooperation.

However I think the discussion here has been constructive, useful and has
covered a lot of ground.  If it had taken place in OSM-TALK probably more
people would be aware of it but on the other hand the quality of the
contributions here has been high and it is something very fundamental to
OSM.

So thanks to all who have contributed and you never know so parts might end
up in osmweekly.

Cheerio John

On Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 07:12 Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> 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"
>
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