[OSM-talk] Syntactic conventions for tags

[Andrew Chadwick (mailing lists)]

Jochen Topf wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 01, 2009 at 11:01:48PM +0000, Andrew Chadwick (mailing lists) wrote:
>> (Actually, I like the colon syntax a lot. Wonder if it's worth 
>> formalising that a bit more, saying that either order matters, or order 
>> doesn't matter?)
> 
> Of course the order matters, otherwise its a different tag key.

But of course. What I'm doing here is descriptive, not prescriptive. A 
guide to patterns in how people tend to name things rather than how the 
DB and OSM XML constrain things, for the most part. Does that make sense?

There might be some usable technical fallout too.

> The Venn
> diagrams you describe are the wrong image, because sets are unordered.

Probably right. Too much seeing name:source as well as source:name in my 
local area, I guess.

> In most cases a colon is not a sign for a "meta-tag" as you describe there,
> but more of a "namespace". This is most often used for external data
> attached to imports. See for instance all the keys starting with
> "tiger:".

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Any_tags_you_like#Syntactic_conventions_for_new_tags

Updated, based on 
http://tagwatch.stoecker.eu/Europe/En/top_undocumented_keys.html . Can 
you re-check? I've identified four patterns that seem to be present, do 
you see the same?

-- 
Andrew Chadwick