[Tagging] Draft Proposal: Default Langauge Format

[Christoph Hormann]

On Wednesday 26 September 2018, Wolfgang Zenker wrote:
> > * allow mappers to accurately document information on names of
> > features in all situations that might exist world wide where there
> > are verifiable names with as little effort and in the least error
> > prone way as possible.
> > * allow data users to interpret this data without constraints due
> > to intransparent preprocessing performed by the mappers.
>
> I'm not sure that all the participants in this discussion and all the
> supporters of the draft proposal (and previous proposals) do really
> agree on the ultimate aim of that proposal. 

Yes, of course i should have mentioned that this is just my personal 
opinion.  I did not mean to imply to speak for anyone else.

> Hence my suggestion to 
> explore the problem space first and find out what problem(s)
> different people try to solve with that proposal, then identify the
> constraints that reduce the possible solutions space and the "nice to
> have" properties that we'ld like to see in the solution.

Yes, you can try to systematically develop a solution after defining 
requirements and quantifying priorities.  But you need to keep in mind 
that in OSM you have no centralized decision making process as you 
usually have in engineering disciplines.  So you would already have 
trouble finding agreement on what exactly the problem is.  And 
experience tells that the solution space is typically much smaller than 
the problem space when it comes to tagging in OSM.  Long story short:  
Finding consensus on the solution is often much easier than on the 
problem.

Still you are right, systematically collecting all the problems related 
to name data recording in OSM would be quite useful - even if just from 
a single person's perspective.  But that is already quite a huge amount 
of work.

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