[OSM-talk] golf course marking

[Erik Johansson]

On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 1:02 PM, David Earl <david at frankieandshadow.com> wrote:
>  I'm sure in due course we'll get language specific ways of adding data, in
> which case the underlying name of the tag will be irrelevant anyway.

I think we are stuck with highway forever, because everyone want
renderable maps now. So the first who adopt will always now how we did
it before, and hence want to use the same scheme, so they will use
highway=* and landuse=brownfield forever (another 7 years?).

Can this be solved be using the Wikipedia way with redirects, and
disambiguation's, if we had that I could[1] do this:
landuse=brownfield
#redirect[[landuse=Development & Demolition area]]

but I can't, because it  impossible to implement without a lot of
discussion and agonising.

[1] http://fakestevec.blogspot.com/2008/04/in-soviet-russia-features-request-you.html


>  It really, really doesn't matter what the names of tags are for how the
> system works. They might as well be wibble=wobble for the difference it
> makes. They are useful as memory joggers, but really no more. So long as the
> meaning is understood (i.e. written down), just use it as defined and stop
> worrying about it.
> [...]
>  However, FWIW, brownfield and greenfield arose because they are widely used
> terms in the UK to describe land that is a target for builders to build on,
> [...]
>  And one of the Oxford English Dictionary definitions of highway is "Any
> track well-beaten or regularly traversed by animals or things" which sums it
> up pretty well IMO. (Another is "especially a main or principal road ...").
> [...]
>  I think you just need to accept this is the wording people have come up
> with and get on with the job, and stop agonising about it.

This is my agonising part, which you are free to ignore if you don't
agree with me to some part at least.

Try not to fall in the trap of being Commonwealth centric. Tags,
words, language are only what people think they are, the definition is
only secondary. You wont start thinking northen cyprus is Turkish just
because all street names have been such in the last 30 years. Do you
understand why people (as in I) can misunderstand things?


> Personally I think the attempts to group tags causes more arguments
> than it is worth

It's wonderful when you are mapping, do you have any better idea on
how to learn while you are tagging?


[1] http://fakestevec.blogspot.com/2008/04/in-soviet-russia-features-request-you.html

/Erik

PS Andy there is no better alternative to highway, and it was a lot
better than what we had. DS