[OSM-talk] Prolification of the amenity tag

[bvh]

On Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 01:00:16PM +0100, Joerg Ostertag (OSM Munich/Germany) wrote:
> 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 Yes the data on some of the hotel was outdated.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.

Age of features information is not easily presented on a map
and is currently not available for the common user of openstreetmap.
So there is no practical way to do what you want.

> > * 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 

Yes. And the more possibilities the project gives you, the more
difficult this choice is and the more likely it is that you
focus on the wrong things.

> > * 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.

Up to know I've heard of two competing projects. Openstreetmap
would then be the 3th competitor in this area?

> > * 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. 

But why do they want to add the data? For their own pleisure, or to
be usefull to someone? In the former case, OK, but in the latter
case adding to openguides or yellowikis is much more usefull for
the user!

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

Why not do it in a project where the data actually can be USED
in a practical way?

> > 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.

I don't understand your point here?

cu bart