[OSM-talk] STAGS?

Dair Grant dair at refnum.com
Fri Aug 3 13:43:26 BST 2007


Alex Mauer wrote:

>It's been nearly three weeks now since SOTM happened and STAGS was
>first described.  I have yet to see any description of how STAGS
>might actually work in practice.

Hi,

I'm a newcomer to OSM, so wasn't around for the initial 
discussions regarding tagging. My day job is www.routebuddy.com, 
where we use TeleAtlas data, so I found the "free form" OSM 
model quite daunting.

I watched the STAGS presentation at SOTM and thought it was a 
good step forward: although being able to tag anything and 
everything makes it easier to capture data, actually doing 
something (rendering, routing, etc) with OSM data is harder than 
with TeleAtlas/Navteq data.

That's primarily because commercial data comes with a well 
defined set of tags and values, which rarely change. Of course 
the downside is that they either won't capture, or will capture 
incorrectly, things that don't exactly match their categories.


I can't really offer any insight into STAGS, but the talk made 
me think of the type system Apple use for 
file/clipboard/stream/etc data (UTIs, or Uniform Type Identifiers):

     <http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10-4.ars/11>

UTIs provide a structure to relate values to one another, while 
still allowing extensions to capture new types of value rather 
than mis-casting them into an existing type.


The hierarchy aspect of it is very powerful. E.g., a KML file 
could be defined as being a type of XML file. An XML file is 
itself a type of text file, which is a sub-type of a file, etc.

An app like Google Earth could then recognise a KML file as 
containing KML data, while an XML editor could also recognise it 
as some kind of XML (and so be able to view it, if not edit it).

Similarly a simple text editor would know that even though it 
doesn't know what KML or XML are, it knows that this type of 
file is some kind of text file and so it can open it too.


I thought it'd be worth mentioning UTIs as they, or something 
similar, may be a useful idea for STAGS. I think it would help 
bridge these two needs, of being able to make up new tags to 
capture new situations while adding some structure to make it 
easier to use the data.

Plus being able to namespace tags, relate them to each other, 
usefully process tags defined after the code was written, etc.

E.g., you know that a "zebra crossing" is some kind of 
"pedestrian crossing" - and while you may not know what a 
"wombat crossing" actually is, you can still identify it as some 
kind of "pedestrian crossing" and by implication some kind of 
"crossing" (without needing three tags on every way, identifying 
it as a crossing, pedestrian crossing, and wombat crossing).


I'm very aware that he who writes the code makes the rules, and 
IMO one of the reasons OSM is doing so well is that it's 
ruthlessly pragmatic. So I'm not claiming that a UTI scheme 
would solve every problem, or that it should be used to define 
some hypothetical exhaustive heirarchy of types.

But it might be a useful model to look at, given that it tries 
to solve a similar problem of helping apps make sensible 
decisions about the open set of file types.

I thought I'd mention it as a voice from the commercial side, as 
someone who writes code based on "the competition". :-)


-dair
___________________________________________________
dair at refnum.com    http://www.deathvalleycycle.com/





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