[Tagging] Can OSM become a geospacial database?

[Wolfgang Zenker]

* Eugene Podshivalov <yaugenka at gmail.com> [181209 12:34]:
> вс, 9 дек. 2018 г. в 14:10, Marc Gemis <marc.gemis at gmail.com>:

>> We have tags for that (waterway=stream, ditch, ... / amenity=school,
>> college, university, kindergarten), I don't understand why we should
>> change the usage of name for that.

> How would you map American "streamlet", "brook", "creek" and "river" to the
> two generic "stream" and "river" in OSM?
> Currently they are just putting in the name field, so the only ways to fide
> all "brooks" is by searching the name fields which is not a proper database
> approach.

Most probably you would not want to look for all "brooks", because
"brook" is just one of multiple words that mean the same thing. There is
no semantic difference between a "brook" and a "stream" in general
nowadays. Its just that in different regions of the english speaking
world different words were commonly used, and people in America used
whatever word they were familiar with.

Wolfgang
( lyx @ osm )