[Tagging] Tagging standards [moved from osmf-talk]

[Brian M. Sperlongano]

On Sun, Oct 23, 2022 at 10:18 AM Andy Allan <gravitystorm at gmail.com> wrote:

> Can I reiterate this please - of all the things in OpenStreetMap that
> OSMF gets involved in, tagging is perhaps the thing that OSMF gets
> involved in least of all. So I think this discussion is happening in
> quite the wrong mailing list.
>

I agree.  For those of you on tagging@ and not osmf-talk@, there has been
an ongoing discussion on the topic of tagging standards.  Since those
archives are openly published, you can read the thread starting here:

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2022-October/008416.html

Now that you're caught up, the most interesting moment in the discussion,
from my perspective, was the remarks from the former OSMF chair when he
said:

"there is a case to be made [...] for a subset of tags that are widely
agreed to and "curated". Exactly where the boundaries of that subset would
be placed would be highly debatable" [1]

Those who know me would probably be surprised to learn my position on this:
I'm not convinced this is a good idea. Discussion about tagging standards
always starts from the position that "we should have tagging standards"
without understanding the problem we're trying to solve.

I agree that there is a set of "core" tags whose meaning is so widely
understood and established that they are standard tags by usage and
convention today. For the case of these "core" tags, I'm not sure what
value we would add by labeling them "standard" and codifying their existing
meaning. They're already standard! Standardizing what's already standard
feels like a waste of time, and no doubt the community leaders that would
be involved in such a standards body might better apply their time to other
needs on the project.

Thus, it would follow that the only possible value to be added by any kind
of standardization movement is in the gray area, for tags with some
ambiguity or disagreement associated with them.  However, it would seem
that there is little appetite in this community for any authoritative
"tagging court" to settle disputes.

In my mind, the one thing that has been sorely lacking from this discussion
is a clear articulation of the problem we are trying to solve here, from
both a data producer (mapper) and data consumer (renderer etc) perspective.
I would like to understand, specifically and with real examples, what
problems people are encountering with the current tagging free-for-all.
With that context in hand, we might consider whether our lack of tagging
standardization is hurting anyone or is just a philosophical talking point
by people who think standards are a good idea.

Or, perhaps the real problems that people are encountering might be better
solved by some other approach entirely. There's no way to know unless we
clearly understand the problem we're trying to solve, and to what degree
this problem harms OSM.

[1]
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2022-October/008464.html
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