[OSM-talk] Create two new categories for lawyers, architects, plumbers, etc

Emilie Laffray emilie.laffray at gmail.com
Mon Dec 7 11:56:35 GMT 2009


2009/12/7 Jukka Rahkonen <jukka.rahkonen at mmmtike.fi>

> Steve Bennett <stevagewp <at> gmail.com> writes:
>
> > What about "architect=yes", like you get for bridge, area, building...
> Seems
> to work well. And then, if and when you have more information to add (eg,
> lawyer=immigration), you have somewhere to add it.Steve
>
> For people using OSM data through some "normal" GIS tools, for example by
> importing data first to PostGIS database with osm2pgsql, it is much more
> painfull if each profession will have an own tag like "architect=yes",
> "lawyer=yes" etc. If "amenity" category is not enough I would like better
> to
> have a limited number of other category tags and values which suit well for
> filtering, like "something=architect", "something=lawyer" etc.  Even now a
> limit
> between amenity and shop is a bit unclear, for example in
> amenity=veterinary and
> shop=hairdresser.
>
>
I am afraid that "normal" GIS tools will always be lossy compared to the
structure of OSM. Almost all formats have a fixed number fields (except
maybe GeoJSON). I don't think you can reconcile that easily with OSM whose
richness is linked to the multiplicity of tags that we have.
So the lawyer=yes is a pain for "normal" gis, but at the same time very
powerful for the rest of us who feel limited by the number of fields that
you have in there. To some extent, osm2pgsql works like normal GIS, while
Osmosis produces a schema that keeps the spirit of OSM.
I think your something= is a good compromise in the end.
I don't think there is an easy answer here, and I really don't want to go
back to some limitations.

Emilie Laffray
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20091207/9f5b772f/attachment.html>


More information about the talk mailing list