[OSM-talk] Status of Map Features

Dominic Hargreaves dom at earth.li
Fri Oct 6 13:03:29 BST 2006


On Fri, Oct 06, 2006 at 12:07:12PM +0100, Nick Whitelegg wrote:

> That said, the key/value system is not 
> set in stone; for instance, highway=unsurfaced is not on Map Features and 
> I use it for gravel tracks in forests, etc.... and osmarender understands 
> it.

This is something that has been bugging me.

Firstly let me be clear that I do not object per se to ad-hoc
definitions being used, but if we are going to have a standard at all
(which I definitely think we should!) then it needs to be improved.
Now, onto the rambling.

I really think that Map Features needs to be better managed. I was using
highway=minor quite happily until I noticed that it had disappeared. I
could not find any rationale for this and like others was rather
confused about why it had gone. I tried contacting the user who made the
change on the wiki[0] but didn't get anywhere.

I also notice that Map Features has been translated into several other
languages. This is of course in theory a good thing, but it looks like
the translations aren't being managed at all well; they are not at all
in sync. I think we should consider removing the translations until we
have some more structured way of presenting this information in more than
one language to prevent having misleading, outdated translations around.

It's also not clear what the policy for Map Features being edited is.
The preamble does not say "you must not add/change/remove without first
discussing on Proposed Features" and even if it did, without being
enforced somehow it's not practical.

My proposal is that editing Map Features be restricted to a core of a
few editors who take discussion from Proposed Features in order to
formulate a clearly defined "official" document. They would then make
this document have version numbers ("releases") with changelogs, so
it's easy for everyone (editors, people writing/modifying rendering
software etc) to keep track of updates easily. It may even be better to
have this not on the wiki, but in a static HTML file somewhere managed
in subversion. Yes, I volunteer for this task.

Does any of this strike a chord with anyone? Having a wiki is all very
well but looking at the page history for map features I see a very large
number of edits, many of which have no comment added, so that's not
enough to be able to effectively keep track of the page.

Cheers,

Dominic.

[0] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/User_talk:Sandothegrate

-- 
Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/
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