[OSM-talk] Tagging climbing routes and scrambles

[Steve Hill]

On Fri, 18 Apr 2008, Robin Paulson wrote:

> structure=pole
> highway=bus_stop
> amenity=post_box

Ok, but you still have a potential conflict here.  Hypothetically, you 
could have a "timetable" tag which applies to both a bus stop (tells you 
when busses arrive) and a post box (when is the post collected?).  A neat 
solution is to have "bus_stop:timetable" and "post_box:timetable".

> a lot of the disputes over tagging are caused by people confusing
> physical items with conceptual ones; if we thought about separating
> them before debating a tagging scheme, things would be a lot clearer

That may be, but I still think in some cases you are going to want 
multiple conceptual items attached to a single item - namespacing allows 
this to be done without risk of conflicting tags and makes it more obvious 
how the tags interact with each item (conceptual or physical).

The same thing _could_ be done with relations (i.e. you mark up the 
physical items with ways and nodes and use relations containing physical 
items to represent the conceptial things).  But at the moment that would 
be even more complex than a clear set of namespaces.

  - Steve
    xmpp:steve at nexusuk.org   sip:steve at nexusuk.org   http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence