[OSM-talk] A process for rethinking map features

Dave Stubbs osm.list at randomjunk.co.uk
Wed Aug 12 09:56:29 BST 2009


On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 12:17 PM, Tobias Knerr<osm at tobias-knerr.de> wrote:
> Tom Chance wrote:
>> - Tags are proposed on the wiki, no change to current practice
>> - If the proposal throws into question existing, accepted tags, defer the
>> proposal to small working groups
>> - These working groups study the wider questions and formulate a complete
>> proposal for new tags, deprecation, etc.
>
> People can do this already, and I'm sure that a good proposal created by
> a working group would easily be accepted in a wiki vote.
>
>> - At SOTM present and discuss their proposals and vote
>
> Aka the "people who have time and money to get to SOTM decide" approach?
> I still prefer the "people who care about the issue decide" approach.
>
>> - If proposals are accepted, a combination of carrot (rendering
>> stylesheets, Potlatch presets, etc.) and sticks (error checking,
>> auto-correcting bots) to implement the accepted proposals
>
> On the one hand, you still cannot force software/stylesheet developers
> to use your proposal. On the other hand, we could try the same thing
> right now. The path proposal could have been successful long ago if
> applications were pushing it instead of refusing to use it (see CycleMap).
>

It's on the todo list.
It screws up the stylesheets in horrible ways due to the hundreds of
tag combinations that end up meaning "cycle path" as far as the cycle
map is concerned, so we're investigating more sane ways to handle it.

On the potlatch side of things, potlatch2 will load map feature
presets from an XML description file which will be supplied to the
editor as a user parameter -- this can be used by whoever to add
whatever. The renderer for potlatch 2 is halcyon for which Richard is
currently working out stylesheet files -- again these are user
selectable.
Potlatch 2 demo at:
http://dev.openstreetmap.org/~random/potlatch2/potlatch2.html
(obviously at a very early stage, and presets file is hard-coded -- it won't be)

Dave




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