[OSM-talk] Tag proposal/approval system is too heavyweight

[Andy Robinson (blackadder)]

Dave Stubbs wrote:
>Sent: 19 March 2008 2:25 PM
>To: Gervase Markham
>Cc: talk at openstreetmap.org
>Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Tag proposal/approval system is too heavyweight
>
>On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 2:03 PM, Gervase Markham <gerv-gmane at gerv.net>
>wrote:
>> Frederik Ramm wrote:
>>  > Why not ditch the whole notion of "approved" features altogether. It
>>  > doesn't cut any meat in our community anyway. What does "approved"
>>  > mean, and who has the right to "approve" something?
>>
>>  Having an approved set of tags means that there is ideally 1, but
>>  certainly a small number of ways of tagging common features, rather than
>>  15 or 50. This makes it much easier for renderers, routing and other
>>  types of software, and much easier for people who are improving an area
>>  of map that someone else has worked on to figure out what they meant.
>
>
>Just because you don't "approve" the tag, doesn't mean everybody does
>their own thing and ignores everyone else without any discussion.
>And this thread is starting to give me deja vu.... so lets not rehash
>this argument again.
>
>
>>
>>  It also means that when a particular tag is used, it only has one
>>  meaning. Without some standardisation, does maxspeed=50 mean mph or kph?
>>  Or does it vary from country to country?
>
>whoa! now that's some serious deja vu....
>
>>
>>  What is the difference between your argument and "Why have the notion of
>>  an "approved" set of HTML tags? The web is a collaborative community.
>>  No-one has the right to approve anything. We should all just use the
>>  markup tags that seem most sensible."?
>
>it's called XML... and microsoft have proved what really cuts the mustard
>there.
>
>>
>>
>>  > Right, generate it from the planet file and that's that. Maybe have a
>>  > wiki page that documents what the renderers do and at what zoom level
>>  > (ideally auto-generated as well).
>>
>>  Except that such a generated page would have no way of ordering and
>>  classifying the tags so that you could find the one you wanted.
>
>Here I agree. You want some more information than just that. ie: a
>system where people can document and add meta data to tagging schemes
>such as categorisation and common groupings (although maybe that one
>can be automated a bit). A planet dump is a good base, but some
>explanation for horse=yes wouldn't go amiss.
>

80n and I were just discussing this issue over coffee. We both feel that
generating tag lists from planet is a good idea, but to give prominence to
them (ranking if you like) it would be good to have the number of users for
a particular tag rather than the actual occurrence of the tag in the
database. Planet is supposed to have usernames now (where are we with that
one?) so it should be a relatively simple task to automate from planet as
others have attempted to do previously (tagwatch etc).

We could still do with a logical layout structure for tags, to help find
them, associate them with other tags, and to assist in new tag names, but
that's a separate task.

Cheers

Andy

>Dave
>
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