[Tagging] How to overcome lack of consensus

[John F. Eldredge]

On 09/19/2013 05:32 AM, Dan S wrote:
> 2013/9/19 Janko Mihelić <janjko at gmail.com>:
>> Anyway, connection to wikipedia articles is only a small, secondary part of
>> my proposal. Links between tags themselves is something we have to document
>> somewhere. We have to have a place where a data consumer sees that
>> amenity=fastfood is a specific kind of a amenity=restaurant.
> ...but it isn't! It's a closely-related concept, but to me the concept
> "fast food place" is not a subcategory of "restaurant".
>
> This illustrates, to me, that an attempt to add an ontology on top of
> the tagging is likely to be vulnerable to the problems it aims to
> solve.
>
Well, some people are going to agree that a particular set of tags are 
subcategories, and some aren't.  Having previously worked for ten years 
for a food broker, which dealt with both grocery-store and food-service 
clients, I can tell you that the division between "fast food" and "slow 
food" isn't as sharp as you might think.  Many establishments prepare 
some items from scratch, and others from a semi-prepared state.  So, I 
would class fast-food establishments as a type of restaurant.