[OSM-talk] Tagging climbing routes and scrambles

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 01:23:32PM +0100, Steve Hill wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Apr 2008, Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> 
> >I can't claim to have the right answer, but I will state that it is not
> >common in geographic software to have namespaced attributes: in general,
> >when this is the case, it is a namespace based only on the object type
> >which has a specific schema. (In this case, that would be something like
> >pisteLift, since the dataset would be a list of pisteLifts.)
> 
> But in common software, do the objects have an explicit type?  In 
> OpenStreetMap they do not - the type is determined by a bunch of arbitrary 
> tags, for which you need background knowledge of which tags define the 
> object type and which just define attributes (e.g. there is no unified 
> "type" tag which you know will always define what the object is).

In general, yes, objects are put into a specific database table or some
such because they have a specific type with a known set of tags. This
isn't really much different than well-curated OSM data, which typically
makes it entirely possible to do this using hueristics.

It almost sounds like the proposal is to use namespaces in place of a
'type' property on the object... which I personally think would be a
better way to go than to namespace every tag...

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta