[Tagging] Issues relating to URIs and tagging

[Andy Mabbett]

Hello everyone,

This is my first post to the list, which I've just joined, but I've
been a mapper for a few years and some of you might remember me as
compere at last year's State of the Map.

Yesterday, I met with the W3Cs'  "data on the web best practice"
working group. At their request, I gave a talk on the use of URIs
(particularly linked data URIs) and related tags,  in OSM.

I described, and we then discussed, how we tag entities in OSM, using
UIDs but not necessarily URLs, and issues facing data users who need
to resolve those UIDs back to URLs; for example:

    openplaques_plaque = 1536

to:

   http://openplaques.org/plaques/1536

To that end, I've just modified [[Template:KeyDescription]] by adding
two parameters:

   https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Tag:historic%3Dmemorial&diff=prev&oldid=1010411

for "website" and "url_pattern"; see:

   https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:openplaques_plaque

of an example of how they're intended to be used (the label display
needs tweaking). The model used there fails with Wikipedia links,
expressed as "en:Example", because the equivalent URL is
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example>. Any suggestions for dealing
with that?

They were very impressed with the inclusion of Wikidata IDs

   <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Proposed_features/Wikidata>

The sooner we move that from "Talk:Proposed_features/" to "Key:", the better.

Other issues which are unhelpful to data re-users include keys with
missing documentation; redundant keys ("Key:openplaques_plaque" vs
"Key:openplaques_id"); ambiguous keys ("ref=1234" - ref in whose
database?) and the perennial problem of the lack of stable URIs for
entities in OSM. I have yet to solve that one...

-- 
Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
http://pigsonthewing.org.uk