[OSM-talk] Tagging schema

Richard Fairhurst richard at systemed.net
Mon Oct 5 08:32:20 BST 2009


Egil Hjelmeland wrote:
> OSM is a community of volunteers. So neither bureaucracy or 
> dictatorship is probably the way to go. I would guess that forking 
> off a “tagging” mail group with a strict “keep-to-topic” policy 
> would be the way to proceed.

I've asked for a tagging mailing list to be set up and have offered to
administrate it.

On a more general level, the issue with freeform tags isn't so much that
they need replacing per se, but that the documentation, as almost everywhere
in OSM, is shockingly bad. When you say "I DO NOT WANT TO SEARCH TALK-MAIL
ARCHIVES TO LEARN HOW TO TAG!" that's a failing of the documentation, not of
the way in which tags are introduced into circulation.

In actual fact we _do_ converge on most tags. This whole yes/true/1 malarkey
is no issue at all. foot=yes outnumbers foot=1 by 56610:1 (really),
building=yes outnumbers building=true by 135:1, and even with the oneway tag
(where '1' has some historical currency because early editors couldn't
reverse the direction of a way, so 1/-1 was more common), oneway=yes
outnumbers oneway=1 by 10:1.  As Matt's graph shows, =yes is increasing in
dominance, too. Potlatch has always used =yes and the josm-dev archives
suggest that JOSM switched from =true to =yes last year.

Pretty much the only significant area of disagreement I can think of right
now is footway vs path, and even that's less a confict, more TMTOWTDI.

cheers
Richard
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