[Talk-us] proposed first principles for United States road tagging

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Apollinaris Schoell wrote:
>         Perhaps we should be working more towards worldwide consistency.
> 
> yes, please osm is an international project

I agree that worldwide consistency is good, however it is a target that 
comes at a price, and one has to carefully think about whether it makes 
sense economically to pay this price - or if it may be more efficient to 
reach the same goals on another route!

Remember that the free-form tagging we have, where anyone can do what 
they believe makes sense, is one of the pillars of OSM's success. 
Working towards worldwide consistency does not necessarily mean creating 
stricter rules, but in my experience many who talk about this topic have 
exactly that in mind - the idea is, more or less, always the same: (1) 
convene some kind of expert group to make decisions, (2) perhaps have 
the discussions ratified by the current project membership somehow, and 
(3) find ways to enforce them - voila, consistency by decree.

The danger behind such an approach is that it could kill the "drive" 
that many mappers have. The "let's roll up our sleeves and get something 
done" spirit could suffer if mappers feel controlled/overruled by 
someone somewhere (witness the many disgruntled Wikipedians coming to 
OSM and expressing relief about the absence of self-made relevance 
criteria - just because a decision is carried by a majority doesn't mean 
it is good for the project).

Thus, it *may* be better to accept that people in different countries or 
even different regions tag their stuff differently, and work on a smart 
way to handle all this. More work for those using the data but at the 
same time less of a corset for those creating it.

SteveC wrote about this half a year ago, and already saying that he was 
"reviving an old idea":

http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/dev/2009-October/017287.html

As discussion progressed he was reminded of the Osmosis TagTransform 
plugin which can already do a lot of work "streamlining" an OSM data 
set. Surely not the answer to everything, but worth investigating.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"