[OSM-talk] Prolification of the amenity tag

[Paul Youlten]

Hi Bart,

I disagree with you:

1) All public amenities (including restaurants, cafes, hotels, shops and 
yes, even public wi-fi access points) should be welcomed as they add to 
the utility of the map (they are, after all, just an extra node with a 
name and couple of attributes).

2) Assuming you can draw up an agreed list of accepted amenities 
(motorway service stations yes, bike shops no; churches with spires yes, 
tall office buildings no; football stadia yes, shopping malls no;...) 
Who is going to police it?

It would be better for us to think about how best to present the amenity 
information at different levels of zoom (maybe including flight paths).

PY
(inclusionist)
bvh wrote:
> While this mail has been triggered by the proposal for
> amenity="wifi", it is more about the amenities tag in general and
> that is why I bring it up here instead of on the wiki.
>
> My take on the amenities tag is that recent proposals have drifted to
> uses that are better served outside the openstreetmap database.
>
> For starters a (maybe) trivial conclusion : we do not want to tag
> everything that has a location (even if we could). So the question 
> is where do we draw the line?
>
> My take on it is that we should try to tag everything that is needed
> to find your way (the purpose of a map, no?) So it's perfectly
> reasonable to tag football stadiums and churches because by virtue
> of being easily recognizable they serve as a point of reference
> out there in the field.
>
> However, amenities="wifi", ="park_ride", ="clinic" etc don't share
> that purpose. There is little value to add them to a map.
>
> That is not to say there is no value in knowing where these things are.
> But that purpose is better served with a seperate project
> (let's call it openyellowpages). And certainly in Web 2.0 spirit
> of things there would be a mash-up so that if a user searches for
> all wifi zones in her neighbourhoud she'd get back a map from
> openstreetmap and an overlay from openyellowpages.
>
> So, I'll be voting against nearly all amenities proposals that are
> currently being considered and I hope to find some people who think
> the same about this.
>
> (Coincidently don't we need a page in the wiki with refused proposals?
> one thing we can immediatly add is flight paths.)
>
> cu bart
>
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