[Talk-us] Removing tiger:* tags

[Anthony]

On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 2:25 AM, Val Kartchner <val42k at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-07-30 at 15:00 -0400, Anthony wrote:
>> Basically, the only tag I can imagine worth keeping would be the
>> name_type, name_base, name_* ones, and those should be removed from
>> the tiger:* namespace.  But really before that can be done a standard
>> should be decided on about how to store the names.  Once that is done,
>> I'll gladly produce a script to re-add all the name_base/name_types
>> that I've deleted.
>
> Good luck on this idea.  This is the fourth time that it has been
> brought up since I've been on this mailing list (less than a year).
> There is much discussion but no decision is made.  The topic gets
> dropped, then the topic comes up a few months later.

Well personally I'm not all that hot on the idea myself.  There's a
good chance it'll turn out to be too complicated for the average
mapper (who probably isn't even going to read the spec), especially
when it comes to the more complicated road names which are the ones
that the tag is useful for in the first place.

The achilles heel of the current OSM API is that there's no way to
enforce structure other than to put it in each of the individual
editors.  So someone changes the name of the road without
appropriately changing the name_base or the name_type, and you've got
the same inconsistent data that's on so many of the tiger ways right
now.  If that's something that's only going to happen occasionally,
fine.  If it winds up being an ignored tag just like the tiger:* tags
are now, then we're better off not troubling the people who do want to
keep it right.