[OSM-talk] OSMdoc: Questions for a new version [namespaced keys, multivalued values]

[Lars Francke]

As a few people already know I'm currently working on a completely new
version of OSMdoc.com including many nice (at least I think so)
features.

But I've got a few questions and I wouldn't mind some community input
(so this probably won't be the last mail about osmdoc). I try to write
something on the blog [1] regularly too but I don't know how
interesting that'll be for the average user.

1) What should I do with "namespaced tags". I mean all tags with
colons in them to separate parts of the key. Examples are the tiger
tags (tiger:tlid, ...), the Karlsruhe schema for addresses (addr:),
name tags (name:de) or the seamark tags used by OpenSeaMap. The only
thing I'm doing at the moment is to point from one tag to all its
'child' or 'parent' tags. So "addr" has a link to "addr:city",
"addr:street" and so on and "addr:city" has a link to "addr". Does
anyone have more ideas about what to do with this information? Any
kind of analysis or data you'd be interested in just let me know.

2) Multivalued tags separated by semicolon. I'm leaning towards just
splitting every single value on semicolons and treat them separately.
So a tag like "amenity=parking;restaurant;fuel" would not result in
one entry just like that in OSMdoc now [2] but in three different
entries (or increases of the counters) for amenity=parking,
amenity=restaurant and amenity=fuel. I've looked through a few (very
few) tags and I couldn't find a use of the semicolon for other
purposes but I'd add the option to ignore the semicolon for certain
keys ("name" perhaps?). Does this sound reasonable? Any other ideas?

3) This is quite technical but would any developer be interested in a
PubSubHubBub [3] way to access changes to OSM data (and/or tag
information) and/or a Thrift [4] API to access the data?

So I'd be interested in all your ideas for the above. I'm also
interested in cases where the colon (for keys) or the semicolon (for
values) is used in other ways than described so I can add them to a
blacklist that is not processed as described.

In addition any comments or feature suggestions are always welcome.

Cheers,
Lars

[1] http://osmdoc.blogspot.com/
[2] http://osmdoc.com/en/tag/amenity/parking;restaurant;fuel
[3] http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/
[4] http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/