[Talk-us] Removing tiger:* tags
Alan Mintz
Alan_Mintz+OSM at Earthlink.Net
Fri Jul 30 19:24:15 BST 2010
At 2010-07-30 07:28, Anthony wrote:
>On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 12:24 AM, Alan Millar <amillar503 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I haven't seen a conclusion on what people want to see in the naming
> > convention (see for example the thread at
> > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/2010-April/003138.html).
> >
> > Just because the conversation is ongoing, that doesn't mean you need to
> > delete the data in the meantime.
>
>No, I don't need to, and I generally only do so when I'm otherwise
>editing the ways anyway.
> I've explained my reasons, and I haven't
>heard anything to change my mind about them.
[ This is long. Sorry. ]
I really don't understand your argument. It's the nature of OSM that many
people will contribute many types of data, much of which will not be cared
about or understood by the majority of consumers. What's wrong with that,
and why do you think removing it because you don't understand or like it is
acceptable behavior in a crowd-sourced environment?
The only reason that makes sense might be "it's wrong". In the case of
tiger:*, it's not wrong. It's in its own namespace because it indicates the
value as it was in another database at the time of import. Not that I
believe we need to justify it, but the three (at least) of us arguing to
keep the tags in this thread, each for reasons that we've described, should
be sufficient to prove that someone needs the data, and you really have no
right to stomp on our work, or data that we need for our work. Also, we're
not alone - many people recognized the need to fix the way names are
stored. Having to go back to history will be adding an order of magnitude
to the complexity of that.
Have a look at tagwatch and you'll see that tiger:* is just one of many
such import namespaces, most of which you are not likely to care about,
whether they are doc'd or not.
There's another, very important use for the "tiger:reviewed" tag. It was
designed to let you know what ways need to be satellite- or GPS-aligned,
since the original data was very poorly aligned. Having these render
differently in JOSM is an important workflow tool. After I'm done aligning,
I remove that tag, as documented in the wiki. When I've surveyed it in real
life, I add source and source_ref tags to cite my source. BTW, someone
started stomping on those as well because they saw no need for my picture
#s[0], but after discussing it, was convinced to leave them alone.
Someone asked a ways back whether the tiger:* tags could be combined into a
single value, which leads me to think that there is a hidden reason that at
least two people don't want these. Does it have something to do with the
editing tools being used? In JOSM, the tags appear in alpha order, which
ends up placing them almost always below any of the commonly edited tags.
Is the real problem that other editors aren't doing this, resulting in
clutter in the editing process? Can't we just solve this in editors, maybe
by placing the common import namespaces last in sort order?
FWIW, the only time I intentionally *remove* data is when I'm certain (or
as close as possible to certain) that it is wrong, almost always replacing
it with my own correct data. I believe this is one of the fundamental
principles of the community, and would hope that others adhere to it. One
recent exception is that, over a large chunk of southern California, a user
had entered maxspeed values that were incorrectly converted from mph to kph
using a wrong, and sometimes unpredictable, factor. I've moved the ones
that I know to be wrong (because they are not integral multiples of 5 mph,
are inconsistent with the road type, and were edited by this user) to
bad_maxspeed=*. When adding the correct maxspeed from my own survey, I then
remove the bad_maxspeed tag. Unfortunately, some remain with maxspeed=40,
for which it is not possible to determine accuracy in all cases, but that's
not a reason to remove them until I have proof. BTW, the same user also
can't spell (English/American/Spanish names mostly), and I've spent a fair
amount of time having to research and correct those, too. I don't wipe them
out just because I think they're likely wrong, though, until I research them.
Notes:
[0] Those source_ref=AM909_* values in source_ref are links to the pics I
have of the names of the streets. There are other source_ref:*=* values for
other attributes that are proved by pics. At some point, they could be
links to an online repository of these pics, given interest, and some
post-processing to remove faces and license plates. Right now, they allow
me to look back at partial surveys of attributes (like speed limits) and
combine them with newer surveying to form a complete picture, and are an
important part of my workflow.
--
Alan Mintz <Alan_Mintz+OSM at Earthlink.net>
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