[OSM-talk] [tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - h==highway

[Gregory Williams]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: talk-bounces at openstreetmap.org [mailto:talk-
> bounces at openstreetmap.org] On Behalf Of PAA
> Sent: 30 March 2009 14:01
> To: talk at openstreetmap.org
> Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] [tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - h==highway
> 
> >> Request for comments on creating the key:h and making it synonymous
> with
> >> key:highway.
> > That's just ridiculous.
> > Don't start duplicating tags with the same meaning.
> 
> It's definitely not something to be done with all tags, but i don't
> think you made a very good case why it's ridiculous for this one tag
> that is both prone to misspelling and in greater use than all others.
> There are more than 1500 misspellings of the tag in the european
> database right now.
 
i.e. a minute proportion of the total number of highways that are in the
data. Looking at that same European Tagwatch data there are
approximately 6 million highways. 1500 misspellings represents a mere
0.025% of that. Doesn't that suggest that the auto-completing dropdowns
and templates are actually keeping the number of errors to a minimum?

> I use potlatch mainly, and it's simple enough to get a highway tag in
> potlatch. Moreover, all the roads around here have been imported from
> public databases. It doesn't affect me personally, but i think the
> cumulative savings in time for all mappers over the rest of OSM's
> lifetime could be substantial.
> 
> >> -reduce OSM data storage space (over 6M highways just from
> >> http://tagwatch.stoecker.eu/Europe/En/tags.html; simple naive
> estimate
> >> 6M*6 bytes=36MBytes uncompressed data reduction)
> >> -reduce bandwidth for transfers to/from OSM
> >
> > planet files are already compressed, you won't gain much by
replacing
> > meaningful tags by codeletters.
> 
> That could be, but there any gain would still have to be a significant
> by the time the planet is mapped. My rudimentary knowledge of LZW
> suggests that 'h' is probably smaller than a dictionary token, but i
> think i have been wrong before, once or twice...an hour.
> 
> > And once you start with tag names, you could go on with values and
> > replace "primary" with "p", "secondary" with "s" and so on.
> 
> "Could", but i'm definitely not advocating that. Let's not throw the
> baby out with the bathwater, as they say.
> 
> I think i've demonstrated some merits in this proposal. Are they any
> good reasons not to do it besides potential confusion? I've waded
> through enough confusion since i joined OSM a few days ago to think
> this small, fathomable addition will be completely lost in the noise.

How about the time it would take to update the software and associated
stylesheets that are consuming the data to cope with the "h" variant?
Would you be willing to update all of these for no discernable benefit?
Wouldn't it simply be quicker to fix the typos in the data and have
better quality data as a result?!

Gregory