[Tagging] Can OSM become a geospacial database?

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

sent from a phone

> On 6. Dec 2018, at 23:38, Michael Patrick <geodesy99 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> This also leaves room for reconciling it with other classifications - Japanese style carpentry roles are more or less orthogonal to Western style,


you are right that there are dictionaries about this stuff, but you will have to have a basic idea in order to make use of them, particularly if English is not your native language, you might look up terms that you are familiar with, and might not be aware that you are missing another relevant term, or that the term is not a translation with more or less the same meaning but only loosely connected.

Language is reflecting reality, and if the way construction work is organized is different in different countries, also the terms describing the workers will not be matchable.

Additionally we are not going to add every single term that describes a profession as a tag, because there are synonyms and overlap. We usually try to create (not too) coarse classes/groups and use subtags to distinguish minor differences. 

FWIW, with regard to dictionaries, in the case of the misleading roofer description, it was copied exactly from the English wikipedia article on roofers, which is in itself not consistent there (mixes carpentry and roofing in the article).

Cheers, Martin