[OSM-talk] [Talk-GB] "Unsurfaced road" and "Byway"?

[Ulf Lamping]

Dave Stubbs schrieb:
>> So you'll end up with (yes, lot's of these variants were discussed on
>> the proposal - and people are very "inventive" to find other variations):
>> shop=doityourself, shop=diy, shop=DIY, shop=do_it_yourself,
>> shop=do-it-yourself, amenity=doityourself, amenity=diy, shop=hardware &
>> type=diy, shop=Baumarkt, ...
>>     
> No. You won't. Because it's still possible for people to come to
> agreement, and to discuss the best way to tag things.
Hmmm, IMHO exactly this *doesn't happen* once people get used to "their 
tags" for a while. They'll fight for their tags - remember the tracktype 
discussions ...
> You don't /have/
> to vote on things for that to happen. Sometimes it helps, so by all
> means continue, but often it doesn't so don't expect everyone to
> agree.
>   
Agree to voting or agree to every voting result being made?
>>> So having nothing other than a cursory flick through my mailing list
>>> archives for some approved tags and comparing them with tags that I
>>> know haven't gone through the voting process:
>>>
>>> shop = outdoor ('approved') - 10
>>> crossing = toucan (not approved) - 49
>>> railway = subway_entrance ('approved') - 224
>>> shop = doityourself ('approved') - 22
>>> ncn_milepost = * (not approved) - 113
>>> amenity = car sharing (approved) - 23
>>> rcn = * or rcn_ref = * or route = rcn (none approved) - 2109
>>>       
>> Well, first of all, the rcn are three tags and not only one. You might
>> know that these are the same, a newbie (or me) or a computer program
>> will - unnecessarily - have a much harder life with it.
>>     
> rcn is two tags: rcn and rcn_ref -- the route=rcn is just there to
> keep the route tag people happy and to provide backwards compatibility
> with some existing tagging (mostly for route=ncn actually).
> Both serve a purpose, and it was done like that to make it /easier/ to
> process on a computer and by a person. And as someone who has entered
> about 150 miles of these and renders them, I can tell you that it
> works pretty well.
>   
I'm not arguing against rcn or whatever, but maybe there's something 
more or less identical in france (or germany or somewhere else) and 
having the same tag internationally might help the french mapper to tag 
things on it's holiday in the UK (ok, rare case maybe) - and will very 
certainly help a developer trying to develop a mapping application 
dedicated to cyclist that should work for the whole world and not only 
in the UK ...
>> Interestingly, you took approved tags that were approved less than a
>> month or so - do you think a freshly approved tag will appear a thousand
>> times a day after it was appoved?
>> Interestingly, you took "not approved" tags that I don't really
>> understand. These tags might make perfect sense to you - for me they
>> have no real meaning (I'm not in the UK). What is crossing=toucan,
>> ncn_milepost, rcn, ... - a voting process might have found a more
>> international recognizable tag than what you are now referring to.
>>     
> ncn milepost is a completely uk thing.
>   
Are you sure?
> crossing=toucan is a crossing for bikes... there was a fairly large
> e-mail thread about them... it's the official name for that type of
> crossing as used by the UK government so is quite useful for cyclists
> in the UK. I'm not going over that again... google for the thread.
>   
I remember that, but I wasn't trying to understand the tags, I was 
trying to point out what the problem with the argumentation of the 
original poster was.
> And again I'll point out that you're talking about discussion and
> documentation, not voting. You seem to link one to the other far too
> closely.
>   
Sorry, I don't get your point here.
>> In addition we also have tracktype=grade1-5, we have surface=unpaved -
>> did I mentioned that all this was *not* approved - and still confuses me?
>>     
> Don't get me started on tracktype=grade1-5... grrrr... but it's an
> interesting case because it's a tag that someone is actually using,
> proposed, got some discussion, then got ignored when it came to voting
> apart from 3 approvals... so someone put it in map features anyway,
> only to be told that no, you can't do that because you need 6
> approvals... which starts an argument about democracy and causes
> someone else to oppose it (at this point if they had any sense they'd
> have created 3 more wiki accounts and voila :-) ).
>   
So your not pleased if someone *is* doing it the wiki style (and ignores 
voting) but your still argue against voting?!? Interesting argumentation ;-)
>>> And more importantly, I know that every one of the not-approved tags
>>> is not only in use in the database, but even being rendered too (no
>>> prizes for guessing where!
>> So all is well now? "I got it rendered and I don't mind if anyone else
>> has a problem with it - or don't understand it" - you mean this kind of
>> solution?
>>     
> Except that the cycle map has a key and a "Tagging Guide"... which or
> may not help your understanding:
> http://www.gravitystorm.co.uk/shine/cycle-info/
>   
Ah, yet another "secret info" that a newbie has actually *no chance* to 
find ...
>>> So lets all be a little less bureaucratic when trying to exclude
>>> things from "Map Features", or alternatively return the page to its
>>> original use (a useful guide to what tags we use) and take the
>>> bureaucracy elsewhere.
>>>       
>> This sounds pretty well, until you think about actually gonna *use* the
>> data. It's probably no fun to write a renderer for the 20000 possible
>> variations of 200 tag's (not to mention that it's ugly, hard to
>> understand, error prone, and slower to work with) - as a result for not
>> doing some proposal work "at the beginning".
>>     
> No, it's about going out and actually doing something then figuring it
> out afterwards.
>   
Fine, exactly what I'm doing. I'm lazy and I only start a new proposal 
if I already had this "new thing" a few times after going out - so after 
I got some experience. And to my recognition, other proposers usually 
start with "I have these ... here and I want to tag them ...", so the 
proposal doesn't come out of "thin air" ...
> I know some people have a hard time getting their heads round that
> one, but the truth is it doesn't end up with 20000 variations because
> people want to be able to use their stuff, so they figure out how
> things need to be done to work. 
If you would take a deeper look at the data, you would know that it 
exactly *does* end up with 20000 variations for things not in the map 
features.
> If we banned voting today, then I
> would still go out tomorrow and use highway=motorway for a motorway.
>   
Sorry, this argument makes completely no sense to me ;-)
>> There are lot's of tags that seems to be a "no brainer" at first sight,
>> but are still not well thought out if you look deeper at it. In my
>> experience only 10-20% of the proposals are really "no brainers", often
>> someone comes up with a good point that should be taken into account and
>> in fact makes the proposal much better - right from the start.
>>
>> And IMHO it's a much better way to think about possible problems first,
>> solve them (where possible) and then use a tag - in comparison to first
>> get a plethora of similiar tags and try to sort it out later. People get
>> pretty unflexible once they have used a tag for a while so fixing this
>> pletora later is difficult or even impossible in OSM ...
>>     
> That's pretty much true. But I've not really seen this become much of
> a problem. You can usually work around it.
>
> Yeah, OSM is not a well oiled machine. So what? It's never going to
> be... tbh for people like me that's part of the attraction.
>   
That's fine if you want to play but bad if you want to actually use the 
data ...

What's the reason that the gravitystorm cycle map more or less ends at 
the borders of the UK ???
There are no cycle routes outside of the UK? - probably not!
There's no one interested in cycle routes outside of the UK? - probably not!
The cycle route specific tags are so UK specific, that they won't fit 
well outside of the UK? - probably Bingo!

Maybe a proposal done at the beginning of the cycle related tagging 
would have end up with a much wider acceptance of the currently very UK 
specific tags - even with no real disadvantages for the UK mappers. But 
now we have lot's of cycle routes tagged UK specific, so changing this 
to be more international is probably near to impossible. Mappers outside 
of the UK might be refrained from entering cycle routes to the data 
because they don't find a tag in map features that fits well. And we 
cannot change the map features to be more internationally because we 
already have so much UK specific tags out there. Adding another cycle 
related tag might also be a bad idea - you'd got a UK vs. the rest of 
the world tagging. Catch 22.


I believe that in a few years from now OSM could be a well oiled 
machine. And IMHO the voting process is a good mechanism to prevent us 
from a lot of headaches for "currently new" tags in the long run - at 
least it's currently the best we have IMHO ...

Regards, ULFL