[OSM-talk] Tagging schemes (Was: Map features page information)

[Wollschaf]

On Tue, 19 Sep 2006 22:32:18 +0100, OJW wrote:

> Idea for a way of generating tags (or rather, helping people decide what
> tags to use):

I am deeply impressed. Something like that for roads and all my concerns
regarding a new tagging scheme are gone... as the task of splitting all
properties a road has in single tags and entering those by hand is too
hard and a general scheme too inflexible. With that tagging guide however,
it is not important how many tags exist (important ones on the top), and
the tags do not need to be simplified... images make categorisation much
easier.

Integrated in an editor, this would be the single major feature to
attract new users - tagging made easy. No crawling through the wiki,
searching for clues...

As standalone web application, much of the ease of use is gone; A simple
interface to an editor could be achieved by just opening the according web
page by clicking a link in the editor, passing way or segment id and also
he current tags of the node/segment/way as parameters; The web application
then parses the tags and presents the currently selected values
highlighted. If no tags are passed, standard questions are asked
(road,forest,water?) and the user is presented the according page that
allows further definition. After tagging is done, the web application
uploads the information to OSM - as passing the tags back to the editor is
somehow complicated and has to use some kind of copy&paste (one step too
much, IMHO).

This approach makes (easy) tagging independent of the editor, and it can
be expanded without having to modify every single editor out there when
new keys are created.

To ensure accountability and prevent random misuse, the editor could
ask the OSM server for a temporary key, that is then passed to the web
application and from there back to OSM -> editing linked to user account
without passing login details around.

Wollschaf