[Talk-GB] Historic England - tagging guidelines - can we agree on the English usage

[Robert Whittaker (OSM lists)]

On Fri, 23 Jul 2021 at 19:17, Jez Nicholson <jez.nicholson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Are there any hidden benefits to having separate he/cadw/etc. references that we would miss out on? Are there any arguments against heritage:ref?

If you're a data user who actually wants to do anything with these
reference numbers, then you need to know what dataset to match them
to. Having multiple different sets of reference numbers in the same
key is real pain. Yes, you may be able to work out which body is
involved from the geographic location or another tag. But the other
tag is something extra to parse, and may not always be present.
Working out the location means you have to go to a whole load of extra
trouble parsing boundaries and assigning each object to a country.
This is an order of magnitude more difficult than just fetching the
set of objects with a given ref key. So I think we should make it
easier for data consumers by only having one set of reference numbers
in each ref:* key.

There's also the potential for more than one organisation to assign a
heritage reference number to the same object. In addition to a
national body, there may be local or international bodies that
catalogue heritage assets. It's also possible that some assets that
lie near or across national boundaries will be catalogued by more than
one national body.

Related to this, I think it would be more logical to label the ref
keys by the name of the dataset, rather than by the name of the body
that runs them. So for the refs for listed buildings, we'd derive
something from "National Heritage List for England" (ref:GB:nhle=* for
example) rather than "Heritage England". This is more specific, and
also more universal, as it's possible that the same body could be
maintaining more than one dataset, and it would be useful to
distinguish between. (Natural England would be a good example here.)

Robert.

-- 
Robert Whittaker