[OSM-talk] Prolification of the amenity tag

[Joerg Ostertag (OSM Munich/Germany)]

> My main concern against allowing an unlimited amount of geo information is
> * more features means more outdated information (especially
> with quickly changing stuff like wifi zones, shops, etc), harming
> the credibility of other information also in the database
> (Note missing information is better than wrong information)

I don't think you can state this so easily. If you know an information is 
wrong and you don't tag it like this that's bad. But if you tell otheres that 
this information was right on a specific date everyone can judge by himself 
if this information might still be valid. So even old information can be 
valuable. Lets start with an example: I drove arround the US some years ago. 
I had my Garmin-GPS with me and every night i started to take out the phone 
an call every Hotel in the nearby area to find a decent place for the night. 
Yes the data on some of the hotel was outdated. But verifying this was pretty 
easy(one phone call) but the rest of the information was very very helpfull 
to me. So I you know the reliability and age of such informations you can 
judge and check very easy.

> * more features means a bigger hurdle in participation for everyone
> involved

Why? I would say more information will be more knowledge for everyone using 
this data. I think you have to focus on things which seem important to you. I 
also think we have to add filter to our editors and renderers which only 
display the information to you you're interested in. This way you could even 
tell your editor you're just checking all the hotels in your area. So please 
display only hotels and main roads. This way you'll have a really good 
overview where you have to add/correct new data you want to enter.

> * more features make it more difficult to edit the map. Theoretically
> the editing tools should take care of that. But currently they are not
> yet good enough, so the concern is real

Well up to now there was no need for the editing tools to take care of this. 
You could see the same with tagging streets. In the beginning tagging streets 
could only be seen if you clicked on the street and had a look at the tags 
assiciated with this segment/way. But now you have the mapfeatures plugin for 
josm and this way you can easily see which type of road you're editing. The 
same thing will happen with amenity Icons and all other features we'll 
introduce. You can't expect Imi or other programmers to start one of these 
tools before there is real need for it. Since we do have a lot of areas which 
need improvement, it is most likely that improvements in the near future will 
only happen at this places where it's most urgent.

> * by accepting this data we may cut short the birth of a better
> adapted "openyellowpages" scheme. For example it is
> impractical to search for "butchers in Gent" using the data
> model of a map. It would be trivial in a listings data model.

I don't really think this is a real problem.

> * bad priorities. While this is a voluntuur project and we can't
> decide for others how they should spend their time, 

This is definitely true. And we should encourage everyone who wants to enter 
data into our database. So I would try to provide the possibility for them to 
add this information as soon as possible. I think there are some (maybe 
small) areas which have a real good coverage on the map. And I see that these 
people living there really want to continue adding data to OSM. But for there 
area there is nothing really new they could add with the current standard 
tags. So I definitely makes sense to add more different data in these areas. 
And the next tings to add there are hospitals, pubs, shops, ... I know that 
other areas are still even laking of GPS-Tracks. But most of the people won't 
start traveling for example from to Munich to Hamburg just to do mapping on 
there own. This is another reason, why I think it is very important to define 
these tags now, to be able to gather this Information at the places where we 
can get them.

> we can try 
> to steer them. Eg. I think it is more usefull for people to add
> a new street than to add the location of their local butcher.

As already stated above If you are complete with all the streets in your area, 
why not start tagging all butchers.

> * more distinct features make it more difficult to refactor the
> database if we ever need to (I believe this to be very likely)

I think refacturing single points is one of the easiest tasks we'll ever have. 
It's almost a 1:1 transformation, so I really don't worry about this.

> EXACTLY my point. Freethepostcode is a success _because_ it has its
> own adapted database that meshes nicely with Openstreetmap. The same
> should happen for a listing of butchers, wifihotspots or whatever.

Well this might be true for the UK, but is there any Postalcode of Germany in 
the database? Probably no! I thisk this is related to a completely different 
userinterface, a completely different method to collect this data, ... So I 
personally would even prefer to collect this type of data also through the 
same interface(s) as i collect all the other geo-data.


-- 
Jörg (Germany, Munich)

http://www.ostertag.name/
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