[Talk-us] Highway Tagging Consensus to Improve OSM (and address some of 41 latitude's concerns)

[Mike N.]

> On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 9:03 PM, Mike N. <niceman at att.net> wrote:
>> Keep in mind that there are already people using US OSM data in real
>> applications.
>
> Where?

  Cloudmade developers, who sell smartphone apps that use Cloudmade tiles 
and routing data, and can provide turn by turn directions.  For example, the 
iPhone paid 'offmaps' app, which offers US coverage.

  There's Skobbler, whose 'Skobbler US' navigation app for the iPhone is the 
#1 free US nav app, and the #18 free app overall for the iPhone in the US. 
I believe they process their own planet data, and probably don't follow the 
US OSM talk list.    I use it and am mostly surprised when it works well in 
areas that I've never touched.

  And MapQuest is looking at US data and processing it (even though you 
could argue that no one uses it yet) - it would be a courtesy to their devs 
to get a notice from the community that something will change rather than 
their renderer just start churning out blank maps because the data no longer 
makes sense.

>> By all means, let's move forward, but not burn consumers by
>> removing ref* or name* tags to force them to change.   Otherwise we will
>> just be laboring like monks to produce a mountain of pure XML that no one
>> cares about because it's to difficult to catch a moving specification 
>> that
>> has no concern for compatibility.
>
> For now, if people don't want the spec to change, they shouldn't
> download new planet files.  If that becomes a big enough problem (one
> of the reasons I'd like to know who it is that's using the data), then
> the solution is to offer stable branches, not to stop the development
> of anything that might break backward compatibility.

   Many changes can be implemented with an announce and transition period. 
Telling Skobbler to stop downloading the planet because they want a spec 
they can follow (and work with the Apple app store 3 month release cycle) is 
not realistic.    We no longer are working with a clean sheet of paper.   We 
can move forward, but just need to consider those using the data.