[Tagging] football or soccer ?

[M∡rtin Koppenhoefer]

2010/7/1 John Smith <deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com>:
> Not that I'm advocating this at all, and not that english names can't
> be used in the same manner for the purposes of translations, but there
> is several ways you could do this and have numbers that didn't
> conflict, for example you could use UUIDs, you could do a hierarchical
> type thing similar to yahoo WOE IDs where you assign each category a
> number from 0000 to 9999,


nobody will ever need more than 640 kB of RAM ;-)

> then each sub-type gets a number added on to
> the first, eg sport could be 2463 and soccer could get 1322 so
> sport=soccer would be 24631322 and so on.


sure, there could be ways, but actually I don't see the benefit. I
think it's cool that most tags are understandable directly in the xml
without the need for any translation tables.


> Depending how cleverly the editor was programmed you could still do
> auto completion because words could be converted into numbers.


hm, I don't believe this, It could be programmed, but unless you know
which number stands for what, this seems to facilitate errors quite a
bit. You could then retranscribe the numbers in the editor into
understandable language for the mapper, but hey, wouldn't that result
in a similar system we already have? Why should then be less
discussion about single words?


> At the
> same time there is no reason multilingual stuff couldn't be treated
> the same way even now where all tags are translated into a persons
> language and then behind the scenes converted to/from raw key/values
> etc etc etc


we already do this with presets, and I don't like the concept either
;-), I'm using the english JOSM version because of this. Part of the
"problem" in this thread derives exactly from this (soccer vs
football).


cheers,
Martin