[OSM-talk] NoName

[Ben Laenen]

On Monday 15 September 2008, Erik Johansson wrote:
>  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.


Somehow this idea got lost in the whole discussion, but IMHO this is the 
better way to do this. It's easily readable to editors as they see 
name:absent at the same location (alphabetically) as name or whatever 
tag they want, and it's easily extendable to any tag that might need 
it. Furthermore it won't break anything existing today.

Also, the disadvantage mentioned above doesn't really count here, since 
most renderers don't need to know about it, and the same could be said 
about noname=yes.

Greetings
Ben