[talk-au] OpenStreetMap in Government

[waldo000000 at gmail.com]

David, to me your response seems to be mostly in agreement with what I
said. On what point, exactly, do you disagree?

Do you at least agree that a useful tag is one whose meaning is either 1)
immediately obvious (e.g. like width=*) OR 2) clearly/objectively described
in the wiki?


On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 2:09 PM, David Bannon <dbannon at internode.on.net>wrote:

>
> I am not sure I agree with you Waldo0000.. (???).
>
> Its useful in my opinion when ever storing data (of any nature) to think
> about how that data will be used. While we will often find other use
> cases later on, addressing the primary one is important.
>
> I think very few users of map data are prepared to, eg, install mapnik
> or grep through the downloaded data relating to a particular road they
> may consider using. Instead, they want to get a idea of just how
> passable a road might be. They are asking a very subject question and
> expect a subject answer.
>
> They want to know if its a sealed or not. If not, they will ask if its
> suitable for a conventional car, an SUV, a 4wd, a "blood and guts 4wd".
> Armed with that info, they look at their own car and their willingness
> to take risks and/or have some fun.
>
> Thats all very subjective ! My point is, most of that process is, of
> necessity, completely subjective, not just the tagging we are talking
> about here.
>
> The smoothness= tag ( http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:smoothness
> ) tries to address this, but smoothness is quite often not the issue and
> the values given to smoothness= are simple horrible (pun intended). (I
> suggested, in the past, we should alias something like 'drivability' to
> 'smoothness'). Anyway, smoothness= has all those subjective problems,
> its there and usable. If I could get over the idea of calling my
> favorite tracks 'horrible', I'd use it !
>
>
> So, at the risk of being called politically incorrect, I think we need
> to collect data that can and will be used.
>
> David
>
>
> On Tue, 2013-05-14 at 07:58 +1000, waldo000000 at gmail.com wrote:
> > On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 9:37 PM, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> >
> >         Sometimes people think that it's better to slice up
> >         information into
> >         lots of little "objective" facts, like (in the case of
> >         mountain bike
> >         trails), width, surface, grade, etc, rather than a
> >         "subjective" fact
> >         like trail rating. But in practice, it's impractical to
> >         collect that
> >         much information, and it's impractical to combine it back into
> >         a
> >         usable form for data consumers, so we lose twice.
> >
> >
> > The important point is that a subjective tag at least needs an
> > objective definition. See e.g. the pretty good definitions on
> > http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Grade. The subjective tag
> > "tracktype=grade1", according to the definition "Paved track or
> > heavily compacted hardcore" could easily be replaced with the
> > objective tags "surface=paved" or "surface=compacted".
> >
> >
> > I would argue that entering objective facts (e.g. "surface=*" in the
> > previous example) is a much better option than subjective tagging. It
> > requires no more information than you already have, and is no less
> > practical for data consumers. It's actually more powerful, specific,
> > clear, verifiable (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Verifiability),
> > and reduces the dependency of mappers and consumers on the wiki to
> > make sense of the data.
> >
> >
> > Point is: if you insist on using subjective tags as a short-cut,
> > please, please at least ensure they have objective definitions in the
> > wiki.
> > _______________________________________________
> > Talk-au mailing list
> > Talk-au at openstreetmap.org
> > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
>
>
>
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