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

[John Firebaugh]

Hi Charles,

Have you looked at iD's preset-based feature editing UI? It's very close to
what you describe:

- Machine readable
ontology<https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/blob/master/data/presets/README.md>
- Search-based UI
- No detailed knowledge of tagging schemes necessary
- Customized UI for specific fields

We haven't yet gotten to the level of detail necessary to support query
terms as specific as "bagel", nor to cover the immense complexity of the
opening_hours format, but contributions are welcome.

A related project is the Name Suggestion
Index<https://github.com/osmlab/name-suggestion-index>,
which provides automatic tags for search terms like "Walmart" or
"Raiffeisenbank".

John


On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 11:17 AM, <osm at charles.derkarl.org> wrote:

>
> 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
>
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