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

[80n]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 2:39 PM, Andy Robinson (blackadder) <
blackadderajr at googlemail.com> wrote:

> 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.


Yes, but it would be even better to count the number of different users who
have *added* an instance of a tag.  This is slightly different to counting
the users who last edited an element with any given tag.



> 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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