[Talk-us] Is there any value at all in tiger:MTFCC and tiger:FUNCSTAT tags? (Kevin Kenny)

[Kevin Kenny]

On Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 4:02 PM OSM Volunteer stevea
<steveaOSM at softworkers.com> wrote:
> The usage of a tag (via taginfo) does give some indication of its usefulness (e.g. school can't be that important a boundary tag if there are only nine or ten of them in all of OSM), unless massive numbers of them were imported, as from TIGER and these MTFCC and FUNCSTAT crufty stuff.  But when we can hardly figure them out (although Kenny did a great job explaining what they MIGHT mean) AND they are from a "hoary old import" (as TIGER is often called), there really is good argument to remove them.  I'd vote to do so in a heartbeat (if were collecting votes, and we don't appear to be doing so).  Hence, my logic-outline instead.  If they are essentially useless — and many seem to agree they are — I believe it is prudent to remove them.

I don't disagree. Ordinarily, though, I don't advocate removing tags
or objects unless they are clearly wrong, and not just useless - hence
my agreement that the (historic) GNIS points are actively harmful.

Still, given the amount of trouble that I had figuring out FUNCSTAT
from the documentation, it might cross over into 'harmful' since my
guess is that every reasonable interpretation of that confusing schema
is misleading.