[OSM-talk] Map Features tagging question

[Etienne]

On 7/20/06, Nicola Ranaldo <ranaldo at unina.it> wrote:
>
> On Thursday 20 July 2006 20:48, you wrote:
> > Nicola
> > I've been promoting the idea of namespaces for some time.  When I create
> > tags which are for my own personal use, and not have any specific
> meaning
> > to anyone else then I prefix them with my user Id.
>
> Yes this is a good practise,  howewer why did you upload them to osm and
> not
> keep them private?


I uploaded them because others may find them interesting and/or useful.
They are "mine" but ownership is not the same as private.  The prefix will
enable others to see who created them.  Much like a user's page in a wiki.


Do you share your photos with a big set of osm users so they take benefit
> from
> your tagging?


Yes.  If anyone is interested, all my photos are at
http://s53.photobucket.com/albums/g51/80n80n/.  If you see a way tagged with
image=80n:dsc01234.jpg, then you will find it in my photobucket album.  If
there were somewhere for all OSM users to host such photos then that would
be a better place for them.

I'm just curios becouse this is only a database space problem, let's do
> another example.
> In a previous message i asked for a "official" key/value system helping
> software rendering of objects names. Answer was that the software has to
> evaluate them without any help. So i was surprised when in the last
> osmarender version there is a special tag "name_direction".
> I think in few time in osm data repository there will be a lot of those.
> Well this tag does not appear in the Map Features page.
> If OSMF will decide some day to accept the old idea to help rendering
> software
> and formalize a boolean name_direction tag with value "reversed", data
> will
> be inconsistent.
> If OSMF will decide to update all tags name_direction and apply "reversed"
> where the values is "-1" all the osmarender installations will break!
> If OSMF will decide to leave them unaltered you'll have to modify
> osmarender
> to handle the "reversed" values too.
> This is an academic  case,  where the impact involves a lot of users, it
> could
> be useful to create a namespace for osmarender, and transform the keys
> in "osmarenderer:name_direction".


This is exactly what I should have done.  I didn't think it through properly
at the time.


OSMF could decide to make name_direction tag official supported, in this
> case
> i think it would be better software follows OSM and not viceversa :)
> The same if OSMF adopts an official different tag, and more users will be
> confused!

In my software i'm writing code to hide place names where zoom level is low.
> I want to classify them about population, in map features there is no such
> tag. May i create a "population" tags!?!? may i use a so important tag?
> wath's the real freedom limitations? I could convert geonames to nodes
> adding
> population tags and uploading them to osm. I'm sure the next day there
> will
> be a flame on the mailing list :) Pheraps if my software, "OSMNavigator",
> will use a "osmnavigator" name space and i use "osmnavigator:population"
> and "osmnavigator:name" tag i will not offend anyone.
> Howewer if a lot of nodes created with geonames import will coincide with
> already existent nodes someone may have problems (i don't know if
> osmeditor
> or josm or online applet manage nodes with the same latitude, longitude
> and
> different id). But if you specify that "no duplicated nodes are admitted
> by
> latitude, longitude", i MUST modify my import script to avoid creation of
> new
> nodes when already esists and limiting it only to add the osmnavigator:
> tags. My freedom will be the freedom to not impact on other users becoming
> anarchy.
> These are only some reasons why i think the project needs a strong
> formalization.


Would the use of namespaces for tags and values provide enough
formalization?  It would seem to allow the permissive camp to do whatever
they like while the restrictive camp can control their own namespaces as
vigourously as they like.

All that is needed is some agreement that if you tag something with a
namespace prefix then it should follow the rules for that namespace.

no namespace = anything goes
mf: = map features
80n: = mine
nicola: = yours
etc

Actually i decided to add a "layer" to my application keeping big data
> imports
> private, order nodes by town "official" classification and drawing them
> using
> a "bounding box" collision detector. I have to implement a spatial
> partition
> index to make things fast, or to add a "visibility scale" column to my
> database and patching the editor code to keep them updated.
> You can see how much a decision may impact on software developing.
> It could be easy for me adding visibility tags, and have good rendered map
> for
> me, but somewhere other developers may encounter the same problems and
> decide
> to adopt other tags, and so on!
>
> I'm sorry for the above examples may offend someone, i respect your work
> and
> think this is a great project,  I'm just curious to understand better the
> philosophy of the osm world, resolve the problems i'm encountering while
> coding my tool, and hope i can do route planning calculation with maps
> from
> other users and not only my map!
>
>         Niko
>
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