[OSM-talk] Flickr Now Supports OSM Tags

John Smith deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com
Thu Oct 1 08:46:50 BST 2009


2009/10/1 Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org>:

> It's a kind of slippery slope situation. There is fear that once it has
> been proven that standardisation works for true/false values, there will
> be demands to standardise everything else as well.

I think you are exagurating things a little, however a little
standarisation would go a long way, although you have a vested
interest in keeping the status quo because you've built a commercial
model around it.

> This would be positive for the users of our data in the short term
> because it means they would not have to interpret the data; however it
> would remove dynamism from the project and require mappers who want to
> invent something new to apply to the standardisation committee first,

What exactly would be wrong with doing that exactly?

> and we feel that this would be a severe detriment to further
> participation on the mapper side. OSM flourishes partly because mappers
> feel that they can help shape the project, and contribute what they
> think is important, rather than just being mechanical turks (without the
> payment).

I think you are over stating the importance of people feeling they can
contribute by using any tags they please, I keep coming back to the
example of using some random names to describe road types, this
wouldn't do anyone any good, and there is a very good reason there is
a limited number of highway tags for highway types.

> In the long term, standardisation would kill the project, and thus not

I disagree, it hasn't killed the linux project, and in fact
standardisation helps things to flourish more often than not because
things can work together harmouniously, imagine what web browsers
would be like without standards, it would be an even bigger, uglier
mess than we have today.




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