[Talk-us] Tagging of county roads

[Alan Mintz]

>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.

I was attracted to it as a geek, after experiencing the downfalls of 
closed, buggy, incapable "user-friendly" mapping applications. I don't 
believe the underlying system _is_ designed for totally non-geek mappers 
(if there is such a thing - it's kind of a geeky pursuit IMO :) ) - it 
requires way too much research to figure out which tags to use. That's the 
point of more user-friendly interfaces, like Potlatch - to hide some of 
those underlying details. That's where we're going to get and keep larger 
numbers of more casual users.

I _do_ agree that network:state:county is more cryptic than separate tags 
for the network type, state code, and county. However, I think it is a lot 
easier to choose a single key and enter one value (or just choose it from a 
short list in JOSM) than choosing three separate keys and entering/choosing 
their values, and productivity has to be an important goal in user 
satisfaction and retention, too. Also, given that network:state:county is 
already documented somewhere for the relation, I'd like to just expand its 
use to the ways themselves because I don't believe the ref tagging is 
complete without it.

--
Alan Mintz <Alan_Mintz+OSM at Earthlink.net>