[OSM-talk] proposed feature, opinions requested

[Andy Allan]

On Dec 21, 2007 8:33 AM, Abigail Brady <morwen at evilmagic.org> wrote:
>
> On Dec 21, 2007 5:28 AM, J.D. Schmidt <jdsmobile at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Is it really necessary to go that finegrained down, in the definition of
> > the landuse tag ?
> >
>
> Certainly yes.

OK. But why not have different levels of fine-grained-ness? We could
pair off the tags, such as

landuse=industrial
industrial=X

That way, we group together related landuse types, and make life
easier for many applications. For example, a countryside renderer may
not care about the different types of industrial landuses, and want to
render all of them the same without having to have a list of dozens of
industrial landuse types.

If we have everything in a massive flat taxonomy, then every
application needs to know about every tag, no matter how specialist.
But perhaps it'll all come out in the wash anyway, since someone will
make an out-of-band hierarchy available to applications for
pre-processing the multitude of tags. But an in-band heirarchy would
be more useful, I believe.

Cheers,
Andy