[Tagging] Comparison of tag support: Mapnik, Osmarender, Potlatch, JOSM, Kosmos, Map Features (wiki)

[Ulf Lamping]

Am 14.12.2009 01:29, schrieb Steve Bennett:
> On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 11:13 AM, Ulf Lamping
> <ulf.lamping at googlemail.com>  wrote:
>> Partly because of differences in the intention of the renderers. It
>> makes a difference if you want to have a nice map or if you want to aid
>> in editing.
>
> Yeah, of course. The hypothetical "SkiOSM" renderer would support
> different tags from "CampusOSM" renderer. But there are lots of
> differences that can't really be accounted for that way. Why does JOSM
> support "proposed=" when the wiki explicitly prohibits it, for
> example? :)

Where does proposed= is prohibited in the wiki?!?

 > And lots of other little examples.

Yes, a lot are probably simply bugs.

> Why on earth does Osmarender support sport=curling (when nothing else
> does), but not basketball, baseball... Why do all the editors/wiki
> propose a huge range of sports, but the renderers essentially ignore
> it all?

Well, as I've said. Different people write different rules and have 
different interests :-)

> (I had thought sport=chess would be a joke, but I've already used it
> three times just in my suburb!)
>
>> But also because different people are writing the rules. I think most of
>> the people working on mapnik, osmarender, Kosmos or JOSM won't often
>> work also with other renderers at the same time.
>
> Yeah, and I think there is an unfortunate problem where the
> wiki/mappers don't want to tell the renderers what to do, and the
> renderers don't want to tell the mappers how to map.

And I guess this is a good thing.

> There's a lot of second guessing.

Having an overview now, what "the other renderers" are doing is a good 
way to encourage anyone to become better here.

I guess this is also a lack of man power. Don't underestimate the amount 
of time that is needed here. Having the actual usage numbers from e.g. 
OSMDoc[1] would really help here.

>> There is also other stuff, e.g. the widely used piste map things that
>> are documented at:
>>
>> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Piste_Maps.
>
> Jeez, there's something seriously wrong in this whole
> "proposed/approved" process. People put a lot of work into describing
> a feature, but because it's not clear what action it's trying to make
> happen, the thing just dies. ("Yes, I vote to make it possible
> to...uh...continue to do what I already do.")

The voting process was actively torpedoed by some people some time ago :-(

> It might be better to think in terms of "core" tags and "specialist"
> tags or something. If something is core, we expect all decent
> renderers to render it.

How do you enforce this with people doing the renderer maintenance in 
their spare time? ;-)

I think its a much better way to display each renderer maintainer: Look, 
these are the tags that x, y and z are rendering and you don't. Maybe 
you've just missed it? And also the other way round: No one else is 
rendering x=y, maybe this is a bug?

> In all my suddenly non-existent free time, I intend to make a pass
> over a lot of these redlinks, adding descriptive entries, at least.
> ("This tag appears to be used in germany, it's supported by ... etc.")

As mentioned already, the next best step IMHO would be to have the 
actual usage numbers from OSMDoc.

However, it's up to you what you do with your free time :-)

Regards, ULFL

[1] http://osmdoc.com/de/tag/sport/