[OSM-talk] Tagging climbing routes and scrambles

[Dave Stubbs]

On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 1:23 PM, Steve Hill <steve at nexusuk.org> 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).


Why would I want to deal with an arbitrary "attribute" tag if I didn't
know the domain I was working in already?
And more to the point, how does requiring me to use a specific tag
name for that domain actually help with this?

What's the difference between searching piste:lift then getting
occupancy, and searching piste:lift then piste:lift:occupancy (other
than typing more)?

If you're dealing with piste lifts you know the piste lift schema. We
only have a problem if there is a name clash with something that can
quite reasonably be also on a piste lift. Generally you find that in
this kind of situation you actually wanted to make it a different
object such as a relation.

Dave