[OSM-talk] Map Features tagging question

[Wollschaf]

Andy Robinson <Andy_J_Robinson <at> blueyonder.co.uk> writes:
> Personally I like a bit of 
> formality to get the ball rolling and then plenty of flexibility to do
> whatever I like after that

I think formality is important. It is of no use at all to tag the same features
with different tags, cluttering the knowledge the users bring into the database
into illegible little islands. 

Of course it should be possible and easy to tag whatever one wants, but it
should also be a good habit of checking if somebody already created a tag that
fits. Life gets easier this way, for anybody using and creating OSM data. No
more headaches about how to tag a specific feature. If it's not in the standard,
make it. Otherwise take it :)

> Map Features was set up to focus upon rendered maps. We need more to get
> interested in establishing other tagging rules for other purposes as I don't
> think you can bank on OSM ever doing it for you. If it subsequently emerges
> that all the map Features tagging needs to have an MF: namespace or
> something to avoid too much confusion then I have no problem with that but
> please don't shackle the data beyond that.

I tried to think of a new tag subset for ways that is of a descriptive nature
and thus more universal. The main idea is to separate political / administrative
categorisation of roads and the physical properties. I wrote down some of the
unfinished ideas on my wiki page, as I am not finished thinking yet ;)

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/User_talk:Wollschaf

Another idea is to categorize the keys using their names, to indicate that there
is a subset belonging together. Perhaps some tags may be saying the same, but it
is always easier to tell if a tag belongs to something like a road if that's
also in the name.

The current tagging scheme is flawed and prone to be cluttered. Nobody will ever
get much use out of it.

We need standards for obvious things, tags that describe _what_ is there and
_how_ it can be used. A good tagging scheme will be flexible and open to combine
tags in ways nobody thought of before, and most importantly not restricting what
can be tagged. It just has to make sure that tags are usable by anybody
different than the creator afterwards.