[OSM-talk] NoName

[Erik Johansson]

On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 7:03 AM, Jukka Rahkonen
<jukka.rahkonen at mmmtike.fi> wrote:
> Gervase Markham <gerv-gmane <at> gerv.net> writes:
>
>> >
>> > 3. have a special value for the name tag (name=none or some such)
>>
>> I find is really very unlikely that there is any important object in the
>> world which is known generally by the name "none" in small letters, with
>> no.
>  Any GIS software can label features by selecting
> value from a name field.  All of them would label these name=none just like
> that, literally as "none". For me noname=yes would be absolutely better.
>
> More generally this is something that might belong to some kind of quality
> control schema that collects in a easily queriable way information about the
> quality of OSM features: unknown name, traced only from Landsat, poor gps fix,
> all the FIXME notes etc., opening hours checked two years ago.

What do you think of "noname=yes" + "loc_name=Kings hill" if there is
no offical name? The case might be that "King Hill" is something
obscene.

Here is an old post about absence of tags, who I think capture this in
a good way.

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 2:01 PM, Vincent Zweije <vincent at zweije.nl.eu.org>

1. define a special value for the tag (e.g. "" or "__none__")

   disadvantage: takes away a technially valid value, so may not be
   generalizable to tags other than "name".

 2. add another (meta) tag specifying which tags are undefined:

   absent_tags=name,any_other_tag,...

   disadvantage: this is a multi value tag, which complicates the
   model. Witness the gratuitous potlach value-combining with semicolons.

 3. specify a derived tag, as with localised names:

   name:absent=yes

   disadvantage: might accumulate to a lot of extra tags in the database,
   but it only needs to be added if there really is uncertainty about
   the situation.

So... how about doing T:absent=true? The interpretation of which being:
tag T is not there in the real world, as opposed to only not there in
the database.



-- 
/emj