[Tagging] owner vs operator

[Colin Smale]

> On 2013-09-03 13:45, Richard Welty wrote:
> 
> On 9/3/13 7:31 AM, John Sturdy wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 11:59 AM, François Lacombe 
> <francois.lacombe at telecom-bretagne.eu> wrote: Operator could be given 
> by operator=* and the effective owner by a "new" owner=* tag. What 
> about when a business is owned by one entity, but operated on their 
> behalf by another, in a building that they lease from yet another one 
> --- does "owner=" refer to the business, or the building? If people 
> feel a need to tag things like this, I have no objection, but I do 
> think it's getting to the edge of what really belongs on the OSM 
> database.
> 
> it's also something that's subject to change and therefore creates a
> maintence issue. i guess i want to know whether this enables anything
> that makes the maintenece effort worth it. my fear of course is that
> we end up with a collection of useless out-of-date data.

Unfortunately the whole world is subject to change. Where does one draw 
the line? Data must have a life expectancy of more than 1 year? Which 
deliberately does not refer to the age of the information by the way, 
only some indication of how frequently a particular type of data might 
be expected to change. What about websites? Phone numbers? Postcodes? 
Road names?

Colin