[Tagging] Different approaches by other projects

[Tomas Straupis]

2021-11-18, kt, 06:26 Mateusz Konieczny via Tagging rašė:
>> * absolutely no control on quality (of anything: tagging schema,
>> data itself, even general direction)
> That is not true at all.
> See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Quality_assurance
> for example https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/JOSM/Validator

  These are just technical validations. I'm talking about higher level
of Quality control. In particular there are no means of controlling
tagging schemas and their changes. Therefore we have a lot of
pointless changes of tagging schemas, inconsistent schemas (for
example still no clearly defined topological rules), pointless higher
level splitting of classes (say adding landuse=education|religion
instead of subclass residential=education|religion).

>> And at the same time we have:
>> * governments opening their data at a very fast pace, and their data
>> is homogenous - stable and very usable (curated by professionals with
>> a clear knowledge on how and where the data is used)
> If you work with government data and ended with this impression
> you either are lucky or have unusually competent government
> in this area.

  I'm talking about base/georeferencing data - roads, forests, water,
buildings, admin boudnaries etc. That data is usually used a lot even
by other government branches and therefore tends to have high(er)
quality. At east higher than OSM. Address data is pretty good in
Lithuania. No 11 copies of same address :-) But that is not the main
point, main point is that government data structure/schema does not
change without a good reason/benefit.
  Practical example: there are a number of OSM base map servers
created for some specific purposes. They've ran without any serious
maintenance for years. And now we will have to revisit them just to
cater for changes in OSM schema, changes which do not add any
value/benefit. Problem is not the technical change as such, but the
principle that such services have to be revisited and reconfigured
only because somebody decided that tag A is prettier than B. Violation
of basic principle that the value/benefit of change should always be
higher than full cost of change (not only trivial re-tagging in
database).

> It is not coincidence that "all changes are reviewed" is done for a
> "small scale maps only".
> Their workflow would not work at all at OSM scale.

  Well it would work if you would only have consistent control of the
schemas and tagging guidelines, created by people who KNOW, not by
anybody as it is now in OSM. Or at least if you would have clearly
defined strict rules how and when tagging schemas can be changed.

> They have their pluses and minuses. Homogeneity and
> comprehensiveness is a huge plus, but the data comes with the caveat of
> being fragmented into a hundred thousand gratuitously incompatible
> datasets.

  It is hard to say, which one is better/worse:
  * having a false impression of homogenity (OSM has same tags all
around the world but different actual usage even in the same
country/region)
  * having clearly stated disparity (data from different governments)
- note, at least Europe under INSPIRE directive will eventually
produce homogenic open dataset, just they're aiming for something
waaaay too complex :-)

P.S. I totally agree with points about thematic data: OSM has more and
better and there are no competitors on the horizon. It does look that
government basemap + OSM thematic data is currently the best mix.

-- 
Tomas