[OSM-talk] talk Digest, Vol 44, Issue 107

[Dave Stubbs]

On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 2:48 PM, Karl Newman <siliconfiend at gmail.com> wrote:
> It seems that a lot of the reasons for requesting namespaces is the
> potential for confusion about which tag sets the context in a flat tag
> namespace. What about the idea of having a "context" tag which points to the
> tag that sets the context (if it's deemed to be ambiguous). For example, for
> a highway=footpath, context=highway. For climbing=rock, context=climbing.
> Then a human or machine could look at the corresponding tag and see what the
> rest of the tags are attributing.
>
> Thoughts?
>


The biggest problem with this is that I can imagine people will be
unlikely to be bothered to add the tag. If you can add editor support
to automate it then maybe it would work. That gets a little recursive
though, since the biggest point in having such a tag is allowing
editors to figure out the context when they don't know -- to add it
automatically the editor would need to be able to work it out from the
other tags present, at which point you didn't really need it in the
first place. It may be of use to other consumers though.

Traditionally tags get used a lot when they are required for a
specific use. The context=/type=/class= tags are unlikely to ever be
required by a domain specific processor -- such processors already
know what tags provide the context they are looking for, so don't need
the help.

Dave