[Tagging] For your comment: New template: Unit summary

Colin Smale colin.smale at xs4all.nl
Fri Apr 3 11:34:38 UTC 2015


 

>From an IT perspective we should be keeping form and function separate.
There are two facts here: 

1) the altitude of that point is 14505 ft - it is what it is, whatever
units you use. Saying the altitude is 4421.124m is also correct. The
value needs a number and a unit, in an agreed format. It doesn't have to
be human-readable (although that helps), but it must be
computer-parsable. The representation of the both the number and the
unit are for "internal use" and are expected to be formatted in some way
before being presented to a human (decimal points/thousands separators
for example). 

2) there is a sign that reads "14,505 feet" - human-readable and
recognisable. 

It is trying to conflate these two things that makes life so complicated
in OSM. Even street name signs suffer from this - streets are called
whatever the authority says they are called. If there is a sign saying
something else, then there are two facts here, both equally valid but
from different perspectives. 

It's a shame we don't have any discussion about OSM information
modelling. I could start some, but because that would inevitably lead to
some concept of "right" and "wrong" ways of tagging, I will save my
energy for more productive things. 

//colin 

On 2015-04-03 13:18, Warin wrote: 

> On 3/04/2015 8:33 PM, Bryce Nesbitt wrote: 
> 
> On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 2:14 AM, Warin <61sundowner at gmail.com> wrote:
> ele= only takes meters as a unit .. the reason states is that "Renderers have no way of doing conversions on the fly to local units while creating image tiles" ... and this is an 'approved' tag. 
> That's mapping for the rendering's back-end SQL database.

 Not saying it is good... but that is what is written in the wiki. 

> If I'm staring at a sign that says "14,505 feet", that's certainly how I want to tag it.
 Agreed!!!!

 Conversions should be done remotely rather than by a tired mapper at
14,505 feet! And are best done by a tried and tested code. 

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