[Tagging] better classification systems

Tomas Straupis tomasstraupis at gmail.com
Fri Feb 12 08:24:25 UTC 2021


2021-02-12, pn, 09:59 Mateusz Konieczny via Tagging rašė:
> Can you give a specific example of actually existing system?

  Professional GIS. I know Lithuanian national base dataset, but it's
description is in Lithuanian. I think we can find a number of other
base/reference data open descriptions which are done in English. Maybe
somebody from USA, UK, Australia, South Africa can chime in?

> I suspect that "plan properly from the beginning" is not sufficient.

  The key point here is: designed base on requirements. Currently
there is a lot of pointless "what if" which have no practical use but
increase discussion length, complexity as well as complexity of the
final product. Note: main things in cartography have been invented
long time before OSM. We do not have to be "proud" and reinvent the
wheel.

> 1. You have codes instead of words for key=values.
> It seems to fail due to "requires specialized training to use it" part
> (or description/name would be tightly coupled to codes,
> that would just add extra step for additional complexity without
> any benefit)

  Yes, you need to look up. But for me it is a benefit for a number of
reasons stated earlier. It is advantage to be forced to look up rather
than guess. You can guess from one word, but you cannot guess from a
code ;-)

> 1b. When using codes a user is forced to look up in the dictionary
> what that code means and that description is no longer restricted in
> length.
>
> Use of tags like
> man_made=scaled_down_streets_that_may_be_used_for_traffic_safety_education_or_as_a_type_of_a_playground
> is entirely possible with current OSM tags, just noone likes this idea.

  My idea (well not mine, GIS idea) is to use code like:
  class=st07
  subclass=st07ft02
  and then you look up what class st07 means, what subclass st07ft02 means etc.

> 1c. This eradicates pointless discussion if A or B is a better word
> to describe feature class C.
>
> And you have the same discussion about code description

  Description of a class is a large text field. You can fit all opinions in it.

  People have different opinions if forest, wood, woodland, forestry
is the better thing to describe X, but with codes we could go into
meta-level, think of requirements and do not think at all about the
wording.

  lakes could be gw01, riverbanks gw03 and we would not need any
discussions if waterway=riverbank or water=river is better. Coders
could go coding, cartographers could go creating maps and there would
be happiness and sunshine* :-)

* - and beer

-- 
Tomas



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