[OSM-talk] [tagging] Feature Proposal - Voting - architect=*

[Frankie Roberto]

On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 4:34 PM, Tobias Knerr <osm at tobias-knerr.de> wrote:


> > Architect=*<
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/architect>tag
>
> "How do you handle the situation when there are several architects with
> the same name?"
>
> "Relations are not Categories" uses the argument that you can query for
> all objects that carry a tag. This isn't enough, however, if the
> combined information from tags and coordinates doesn't qualify as an
> unique identifier. The situation for architects, imo, resembles the
> route relations (also in that there can be more than one architect),
> thus there is a case for relations.


Good question (and thanks for bringing this up again).

Here's the answer I just posted on the talk page:

I'm not sure there's any easy solution to this. Whilst using relations might
resolve these ambiguities, it'd make tagging a lot harder. Especially as
often all you know is the architect's name, and researching whether one
architect is the same as another architect with the same name would be quite
a burden.

This isn't a very satisfactory answer, I know, but the same problem exists,
for example if you want to do a query that finds all the cafes in the
Starbucks chain - all you have to go on is the name, and so you have no way
of knowing whether a cafe called "Starbucks" is part of the global chain, or
just happens to have the same name. Thankfully, I suspect that in the real
world, these types of ambiguities are fairly rare (especially as both
architects and shop chains are pretty protective over their names as
trademarks).

Frankie


-- 
Frankie Roberto
Experience Designer, Rattle
0114 2706977
http://www.rattlecentral.com

Sent from Manchester, Greater Manchester, United Kingdom
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20090530/27666909/attachment.html>