[Tagging] Development of Tag Replacements (was: Feature Proposal - RFC - landuse bush)

[Brian M. Sperlongano]

On Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 12:04 AM Stefan Tauner <stefan.tauner at gmx.at> wrote:

>
> I think OSM falls for this hen and egg problem since its infancy. In
> the beginning this was not too bad bad and superior tags had a realistic
> opportunity to get adopted even if the existing ones were widely
> used. I don't think there has been any chance to do that for a while.
> How could that possibly work today?
>


> But let's suppose that we discuss this enough so that we get enough
> votes together. What then? Getting everybody outside this relatively
> small party of tagging contributors in the same boat including all the
> software devs, companies and sometimes stubborn private mappers is a
> major effort that basically requires a completely separate tagging
> scheme to remain backward compatible.


Yup, I think you've hit the nail on the head.

IMO, the only way this could be solved is with a technical solution.  There
would need to be a system of backwards compatibility in which existing
clients can continue to access the data using legacy tagging schemes, with
a stated end of life date, and clients could choose to upgrade on their own
timeline to the newer scheme.  This implies a layer of translation that
would need to exist between the underlying data and what is actually
presented to the user.  Now obviously this is glossing over A LOT of
technical details about all of the tools in the ecosystem and how users
interact with the data.  But I don't see any other way we could have a
systematic mechanism for tagging standardization (if indeed the community
even desires it) without some kind of backwards compatibility translation
layer.
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