[Tagging] The endless debate about "landcover" as a top-level tag

[Christoph Hormann]

On Wednesday 06 June 2018, Andy Townsend wrote:
> > Anyway what i am absolutely certain of is that rendering different
> > tags identically in a map has never encouraged mappers to
> > consistently differentiate between them. :-)
>
> The "long tail" of different shop tags begs to differ with that!  If
> what you said was true there there would be an awful lot more
> "shop=yes" (see http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org.uk/keys/shop#values
> , and compare with
> http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org.uk/keys/office#values ).

I don't think it is the map that encourages mappers to differentiate 
shops, it is the desire to correctly document reality.  The 'dot on the 
map' does not really make a difference here.

Overall shops are a good example for where the free form tagging system 
of OSM works very well.

To make this clear since it might not have been from my remarks - i 
consider the influence of rendering on tagging decisions to be a small 
one relative to many other influences.  But there are cases where other 
influences are small where map rendering can make a significant 
difference - to the better or to the worse.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/