[Talk-GB] Southwark update

[Tom Chance]

On 3 March 2011 16:15, Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

That's elegant from a logical and maintenance point of view, but adds
hurdles for the data user.

For example, it would mean you couldn't just download OSM data and stick it
into OpenLayers for the public like so:
http://tomchance.dev.openstreetmap.org/trees.html

A data user would need the skills to use the reference source to add that
into the interface or merged dataset. By comparison, the experienced data
maintainer could simply use JOSM and XAPI (if it actually worked these days)
to fix the error quite easily.

I'm not sure this solution of adding the genus+species+common name+produce
data to every tree is Quite Right, but in my view it's preferable as a
botanical name isn't very meaningful to the average data user.

Tom


-- 
http://tom.acrewoods.net   http://twitter.com/tom_chance
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/attachments/20110303/ad8e8484/attachment.html>