[Osmf-talk] Tagging standards

[Allan Mustard]

I have striven mightily to stay out of this discussion because it is 
such a can of worms, and much of the heated rhetoric strikes at the 
heart of the OSM philosophy many of you so painstakingly spelled out to 
me a few years ago. Nevertheless, I want to make a couple of points, 
then duck behind my desk before the tomatoes start flying.

WRT  Frederik's point,

> 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"...
the point strikes me as an effort to differentiate between objects we 
can all agree to define in the same way (e.g., building=retail, 
highway=service) and objects that are highly localized and can be safely 
defined in accordance with local customs and the advice to travelers you 
can obtain from Lonely Planet guidebooks. As someone who has traveled 
widely over a Foreign Service career spanning four decades, and who made 
his first foreign trip (solo!) at age 17 nearly 50 years ago, I can 
attest that not having full information on whether a "bar" serves coffee 
early in the morning can be a surprise but is scarcely catastrophic or 
overly traumatic. It's a learning experience, and leads to greater 
sophistication.

Under no circumstances should we ever ban or discourage innovation in 
tagging, since the world is scarcely static, and no predefined tagging 
scheme could conceivably encompass every contingency. I innovated tags 
while mapping Turkmenistan, in cases where no existing tag fit, so have 
sympathy for that point of view.

That said, there is a case to be made (as several of you privately made 
to me when I was on the OSMF Board of Directors) for a subset of tags 
that are widely agreed to and "curated". Exactly where the boundaries of 
that subset would be placed would be highly debatable and if anybody 
ever grasps the nettle, starts to work on a tag curation proposal in 
earnest, I fully expect the debate to be white hot. Nevertheless, 
creating a relatively small subset of curated tags that the vast 
majority of us agree on is an idea that bears merit, particularly in the 
eyes of those of us who struggled to produce maps from datasets with 
object tagging that defied all logic or commonality with the rest of the 
data. Defining that subset could make good use of input from our growing 
network of local chapters and communities, for as Frederik correctly 
points out, OSM should not seek unduly to constrain how local mappers 
map their own communities, and the local chapters and communities can 
help inform the identification of universal tags not requiring localized 
definitions.

I'll go hide now so you can throw tomatoes at me.

cheers,
apm

> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2022 13:08:25 +0200
> From: Frederik Ramm<frederik at remote.org>
> To:osmf-talk at openstreetmap.org
> Subject: Re: [Osmf-talk] Tagging standards
> Message-ID:<d9a50f51-5850-df6b-08b8-7ef6305b93c4 at remote.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
>
> 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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