[Tagging] Basic philosophy of OSM tagging

Kotya Karapetyan kotya.lists at gmail.com
Thu Jan 15 20:13:11 UTC 2015


Hi Marc,

> By forced rules: you mean a committee that decides what gets mapped and how
> ?
> So when I want to map something now, I have to file a request to the
> committee to start looking for a new tag. And if they like the request they
> come back within a few months with a proposal. And this committee is
> all-knowing, so they know all the exceptions in the different countries ? So
> I don't have to ask for an update when they misunderstood me ?

My vision was more along these lines. There will be a tagging
committee: It will maintain the official OSM tagging scheme. Mapping
will not be changed w.r.t. the current situation. The tagging
functionality as such will remain as it is, however:
1) Software designers can use the official scheme to implement tools
for mapping, display, and routing.
2) The committee will review the existing tags to avoid conflicts, and
decide what tags are to be deprecated, where to adjust official
definition etc.
3) The short formal description of the tags is included in the scheme.
4) The committee has the final word in approving the tags (just to
remove the mess with existing discussion-voting process).
5) Mappers can still implement and use tags as now, however they
should be reviewed by the committee to get into the official scheme.

So something similar to how HTML standard is maintained by W3C:
Google, Microsoft and Mozilla can do and do whatever they like in
their browsers and online tooling, but there is an official standard
based on some proposals. The software developers do not have to stick
to the official scheme, but it helps make things more consistent.

Cheers,
Kotya



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