[OSM-talk] Personal tags

[Andy Robinson]

Lambertus wrote:
>Sent: 12 April 2007 1:58 PM
>To: Bruce Cowan
>Cc: talk at openstreetmap.org
>Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Personal tags
>
>Bruce Cowan wrote:
>> Last night on IRC, the use of personal tags was brought up as a way of
>> tagging something that isn't in map features.
>>
>> The obvious issue with this is that several people may use different
>> tags for the same non-standardised feature.
>>
>> I thought it might be a good idea to start a page on the wiki [1] where
>> people can add their tags and their reason for using it.  What can then
>> happen is these can be standardised later.
>>
>> [1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.phpPersonal_tags (doesn't exist
>> right now, but will do)
>>
>Isn't this nearly identical to the 'Proposed features' pages? Most
>proposed features are also already in use and are awaiting approval to
>become 'official'.
>

There is a little danger here that new potential data creators will feel
that they have to use standard tags and that also they have to have
alternative tags approved before they can use them. Since OSM was originally
conceived to permit fully freeform tagging we wouldn't want to give the
wrong impression.

It would be much simpler to ensure we use an appropriate namespace where
"standardised" tagging is created.

In other words, we might use "osm:" as the namespace for approved
standardised tags (or an alternative suitable name), I was planning to have
"stags:" as the namespace for the mapfeatures version 2 I was working on for
instance.

Several of us already use our username as a tagging namespace and that
remains the simplest way of identifying custom tagging.

Cheers

Andy

Andy Robinson
Andy_J_Robinson at blueyonder.co.uk
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