[Talk-GB] Southwark update

Ed Avis eda at waniasset.com
Thu Mar 3 16:15:51 GMT 2011


Tom Chance <tom at ...> writes:

>>>Tom, I've noticed you've added a large number of trees with species
>>>details supplied by Southwark Council.

>Ideally, only the scientific name would need to be tagged in OSM,
>with natural language versions added automatically when rendering.

>No, I want to put the species, genus, common name and produce into
>OSM wherever possible.

It's good for OSM users to have this information but if it's derived
from a simple lookup of species name then it's not ideal to duplicate
it on every object.  For example suppose there was a mistake in your
list mapping species to common name.  If the common name was tagged on
every tree, then correcting the mistake would involve retagging every
tree object.  On the other hand, if the tree is tagged with just the
key needed for lookup (the species) then the information about common
name can be corrected in a single place.

Purely from a data modelling point of view I don't think it right to
populate data into OSM when that data is not new information, but can
be automatically derived from existing OSM data.  Better to keep the
lookup table of species information in a central place and give OSM
the necessary data to point to it.

On the other hand, if there is some new fact about the world, such as
a particular tree which is known to give particularly tasty figs, then
this can certainly be tagged.  The key point is that it's information
which could not be deduced from what's already there.

--
Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com>





More information about the Talk-GB mailing list