[Talk-us] Why we really don't get new users

[osm at charles.derkarl.org]

I'm going to just point out the elephant in the room here. I don't think any 
normal user cares about the license at all. I think the actual reason its hard 
to get new mappers, especially those that are not nerdy and obsessive like 
myself is that *the ontology sucks*. There, I said it, so you don't have to.

It's actually a few things related to how the ontology sucks:

1. The tagging of things bears little resemblance to things in the real world:
	a. A lot of common things just don't have standard tags: examples: tax 
preparers like H&R Block, investment brokers like Charles Schwab, medical 
marijuana despensers here in California, recreational MJ shops in Colorado. I 
could go on. 
	b. the whole shop/amenity debate
	c. common things that have really stupid tags, like barber shops
	
2. To be a useful mapper, one needs to memorize these arbitrary tags. It 
wouldn't be so hard if it weren't arbitrary (a salon is a shop? and it's 
called a hairdresser‽). But even if it weren't arbitrary, it'd still be hard 
to remember because things have synonyms, and no shop is called a chemist in 
the US.

Corrolary: A bagel shop is a bagel shop, no muggle cares that a bagel shop is  
fast_food amenity that sells the bagel cuisine.

3. I went to a shop recently that sells espresso drinks, and gelato, but 
markets itself as a chocolate maker. (Specifically: Snake & Butterfly, Campbell, 
CA). There is absolutely no sane way to tag this in OSM today.

4. The wiki is a terrible platform for documenting the ontology because it's 
not machine readable and it's just a slow way to get information.

I don't just mean to moan, though. What I'd like to do is propose a machine-
readable ontology that we could provide to JOSM, Vespucci, etc, that would 
allow newbies to edit the map. I imagine a dictionary and associated tags. A 
user could type in "bagel" and all the reasonable properties show up, along 
with a description of what they're entering:

	(A shop that sells primarily bagels, baked goods and breakfast foods)
	(not what you're looking for? try <bakery> or <diner>)
	name: [ textbox ]
	opening hours: (a *UI* to enter times of week)
	vegetarian ( ) friendly ( ) unfriendly ( ) exclusively
	house number: [ textbox]
	etc

And by filling these properties in, the software would automatically convert it 
to the OSM ontology. All the client software would need to do is be able to 
parse our ontology file to provide all of this. And provide a sane UI, at last, 
for entering opening_hours.

Charles