[OSM-talk] tagging and rendering

[elvin ibbotson]

On 9 May 2008, at 16:48, Dave Stubbs wrote:

>>
> There are some genuine problems that need solving -- tag translation,
> tagging hierarchies, tag documentation and guides, and some "bad" tags
> in common use to name but a few.

Here we agree.

>
> Unfortunately people seem most interested in solving these problems
> via the magic bullet approach. This basically involves turning
> everything on it's head, adding a level of indirection or two, putting
> in some extra technical elements, and finally hoping that someone will
> take the opportunity of the wholesale change to actually fix the
> problem.

I don't think we should be afraid of radical change if it is needed.  
OSM has many years and many more terabytes to look forward to and if  
it needs change it would be better sooner rather than later.

>
> The highway tag has well known problems; mostly that it's a highly
> subjective short cut for lots of tags and widely differing concepts,
> of which nobody is entirely sure which takes precedence. This doesn't
> get fixed by making everyone use numbers.

I just took highways as a simple example everyone is familiar with. I  
don't want to make everyone use numbers. I don't want users ever to  
see the numbers. But users should never actually see the database. My  
whole point is separation of data from the viewing/editing interfaces.

>
> Numbers are an abstraction, that's all they are. The present tag
> names/values are also generally abstractions... just human readable
> ones.

Things humans read need to be human readable. The database should be  
read by software and if it can be faster and more efficient using  
numbers, numbers are what should be used.
>
elvin