[OSM-talk] golf course marking

[Robin Paulson]

2008/5/8 David Earl <david at frankieandshadow.com>:
> 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.

no, it does matter. if all we want is pretty pictures, it doesn't
matter. however, if we want to encourage using osm for something more
innovative than just finding the shortest way from A to B (i would
hope we do, and hope that most mappers here have more imagination than
just wanting that), then grouping the tags in a hierarchy makes
extracting data so much easier

for example:
a geographer may want to compare areas of water in certain
countries/provinces/whatever.
great, they can do that with osm. extract all the water areas in a
given bounding box and away you go. but no, not so obvious, because
water isn't grouped under one tag, it's under several, so they have to
trawl through hundreds of tags to find all those that relate to water;
waterway=*
landuse=reservoir
natural=water
not all of which are particularly intuitive to find
(landuse=reservoir, who would think of looking for that?)

or someone wants to find the length of all roads in a given area:
as it is, this is pretty easy; they just need to find the length of
all ways tagged highway=*

now imagine they're not grouped hierarchically, but are called wibble.
and bugrit. and cabbage. and a heap of other random names (but all
well documented!). not so easy/intuitive now, is it? again, we expect
them to sift through hundreds of tags to find the ones related to what
they want, because no-one thought of logically grouping them

yes, data should be as easy as possible to enter - mappers are the key
element to osm. but there's no reason we can't make the data easy to
extract/use as well, and if we make the data hard to use, no-one will
want to use 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, either previous developed or undeveloped land respectively.
> They're in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownfield_land and
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenfield_land
>
> 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 ...").
>
> Personally I think the attempts to group tags causes more arguments than
> it is worth. If we had just objects with a type (e.g. "school" or
> "secondary_road") which then had properties (ref=B1302, name=High
> Street), we'd spend less time arguing about it an more getting on with
> the job. Not that I'm proposing we change it now, BTW.
>
> 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.

accept? you mean, 'inertia rules'? nothing should change? i think
you're in the wrong place - osm was created precisely to change
things, to not accept the status quo.

i have a point, i'm going to argue it, until someone convinces me
otherwise, or accepts what i'm saying

and i don't "just need to accept" anything; don't be so damn arrogant