[Talk-us] Tagging of county roads

[Apollinaris Schoell]

On 27 May 2010, at 10:15 , David ``Smith'' wrote:

>> 
>> osm principle is to use human readable tags and values. it's a system designed for mappers not for GIS experts or programmers. the hardcore geeks can understand cryptic codes but normal people can't. if we want to attract more mappers this is crucial. if we start to make osm a pure geek project it will not survive.
> 
> The only humans who are going to see these particular tags are
> mappers, since no sane application for non-editors should expose these
> tags directly.  And mappers who are doing anything with route
> relations should have done some reading on the wiki about it,
> otherwise they wouldn't know what the heck they're doing anyway.  Once
> they see that US routes are network=US or =US:US, state routes are
> US:CA, etcetera, the meaning of US:CA:Orange should be obvious.  And
> ideally, anyone doing mapping at this level would be coordinating with
> other Calfornia mappers via the wiki, which should have
> California-relevant county-road tagging conventions documented,
> assuming agreement has been reached.  Or they'd ask for specifics on
> this email list.  Which brings us back to the top of the thread…

totally disagree. if osm doesn't open itself more to non geeks the project will die as fast as many other open source or crowd source projects. 
the scare new mappers away rate for osm is incredible high. making it more cryptic is a guarantee to increase it even more.
what is obvious to you and me isn't for 99.9% of people and probably to 80% potential contributors.
 

> 
> -- 
> David "Smith"
> a.k.a. Vid the Kid
> a.k.a. Bír'd'in
> 
> Does this font make me look fat?
> 
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