[OSM-talk] Tagging climbing routes and scrambles

[Steve Hill]

On Thu, 24 Apr 2008, Dave Stubbs wrote:

> either you're a human in which case most of the time you'll
> engage your brain and figure out what makes sense... or you're a
> computer in which case some nice human has programmed you with the
> relevant domain knowledge, so you know that highway=climbing happens
> to be what you're looking for.

Seems to me that requiring that the computer or human needs a lot of 
background knowledge about how the context is determined is a bad thing, 
given that putting the context in the key (and thus removing the 
ambiguity) is easy.

> piste:lift:occupancy -- wtf? this can only ever happen on a piste:lift
> right? there is absolutely zero point in this tag.. call it occupancy
> -- the result is 100% identical. This is purely namespace wanking for
> the sake of it. It serves no purpose. None. Zip. Nada. The only thing
> this does is make the tag name very long,

Of course it serves a purpose - it tells you that the value of the tag 
describes the occupancy of a lift.  An "occupancy" tag could be used to 
describe attributes of different types of object - number of people in a 
building, number of fish in a pond, etc.  Without the name space you need 
to get the context from somewhere else (one of the other tags... which 
one?) to make it meaningful.

> and add a pile of annoying colons.

Who cares whether we use colons, underscores, spaces, whatever?

> Your average user is quite happily going to type exactly what you tell
> them to. The chance of them remembering the key is probably reduced,

Or the chance of them remembering which tags can be applied to which types 
of objects is increased because the tag name makes it clear what sort of 
object it will work with.

> and the chance of them thinking it's ok to come up with new
> unnamespaced tags is also reduced which will either mean they won't
> propose things

This is completely stupid - yes, they might avoid coming up with new 
unnamespaced tags and *shock* propose new namespaced tags instead.  Why is 
this a bad thing?

> The chance of someone putting up a
> proposal getting spammed by people who like typing is also massively
> increased.

Huh?

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

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence