[Taginfo-dev] Running your own taginfo...

[Jochen Topf]

On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 02:36:57PM +0000, Donal Diamond wrote:
> On 22 January 2012 20:31, Jochen Topf <jochen at remote.org> wrote:
> > I am also planning some changes to the way other taginfo instances are
> > integrated.
> > ....
> > I haven't figured out exactly how
> > to do this, we'll see...
> 
> Love the new look - congrats.
> 
> I've been thinking about this a little. In my case usually I want to
> compare Irish tag usage against global usage.

You misunderstood my intention. I do not want to mix data from different
places. I only want to make it simpler to switch sites from one specific place
on the front page. Personally I don't see the need for the country-only sites.

There are several reasons for that:
* OSM is a global project, I don't want to support the splitting up of the
  world and the community into different countries more than they already
  are. I think having different taginfo sites is already counterproductive.
* Working with OSM data and with taginfo is confusing as it is. This will
  only get worse if you can compare statistics from different countries.
  Does this "42%" mean 42% of all objects have key x? Or 42% of all tags
  with this key are nodes? Or 42% of all worldwide tags are in some country?
  Its one more axis to take into account for every datapoint.
* Comparing different statistics is also difficult to do right, because
  not all tags appear everywhere. The collection of statistics for tags
  is to some extent based on a list of the top most common tags, which is
  also different for every country. It is difficult to get this to display
  in some consistent way.
* Different sites are run by different people, have different update
  cycles and different reliability. Even if I wanted to integrate data for
  different countries, I would want to generate this data on the main
  server to keep updates in sync and to not expose the main site to
  problems on other sites.

So, I will not work on tighter integration of taginfo sites unless somebody
convinces me why thats needed and a good thing. That being said, everything
here is Open Source and OSM is an open project, so feel free to discuss
things here, change the software etc.

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf  jochen at remote.org  http://www.remote.org/jochen/  +49-721-388298