[Tagging] Tagging FOR the renderer

[Daniel Koć]

W dniu 16.05.2015 19:42, Richard Welty napisał(a):

>  on the other hand, demanding that the rendering on
> www.openstreetmap.org [1]
>  be all things to all people is actually pretty unreasonable. the
> current
>  architecture which separates data from style is well considered and
> in line
>  with modern best practices; i haven't yet seen an argument that would
>  persuade me otherwise.

For only experts, probably yes (like HTML development or the likes). But 
we're much closer to Wikipedia, where we don't demand anybody to be 
GIS-aware or to participate in making drafts.

We're not community of GIS experts, rather small-scale mappers, just 
like Wikipedians. But it's much easier to write new article or even put 
the photo there than try to make visible some features one consider 
essential.

We don't care for them now and I think we should start to do it. Maybe 
some user-cases study would be useful to conduct, like in usability 
research - these examples may get you the idea how one can do it to 
imagine the possible real life scenarios:

a) "Mary is a 32 australian farmer and wants to have the data about her 
big farm..."

b) "Jerzy is a 54 polish librarian fond on taking picture of the nature 
and he likes to have a map of birds nests..."

c) "Tove is 21 of Finnish descent living in Sweden and she regularly 
sails on the Baltic sea on her parents boat..."

...and so on. Once we start seeing through the eyes of people using the 
map, who can help expand and refine our data, we can understand what are 
their background, what are the problems for them and how they may behave 
when experiencing obstacles. That may give us a hint what could we do to 
let them be better mappers and achieve their personal goals at the same 
time.

The important thing is we should not just research using tools like iD, 
but rather we should look what they try to achieve with OSM as a 
project. Maybe conducting real study would be the best, I don't know, 
but until we try to understand them, and we will just keep saying "DON'T 
map for renderer", they will go away or just do it anyway...

>  what we could use are more people doing projects like opencyclemap
> and
>  openfiremap and the like to bring out the data they care about in
> formats
>  that they like.

I disagree - they typically won't have enough technical skills and the 
OSM is already very scattered. For example adding routing to the main 
site was a huge step ahead, because it's the whole toolset is what the 
people need, not just a do-it-yourself kit. Google Maps are not the 
best, but the fact that it is part of their ecosystem (routing, ads, 
mail etc.) makes them very useful and popular.

>  my presentation at SOTM US will include examples of using leaflet,
> jquery
>  and overpass to create mashups of OHM and OSM data, and i'll be
> making
>  my javascript available on the ohm github repository under a 3 clause
> BSD
>  license for anyone who wants to play.

That is nice, but most our mappers don't know even these words, let 
alone have enough competence to use it themselves.

-- 
"The train is always on time / The trick is to be ready to put your bags 
down" [A. Cohen]