[OSM-talk] Tagging schema

[David Earl]

On 06/10/2009 13:35, James Livingston wrote:
> I can see things getting ickier than they are now if you can just go  
> around adding new shop= values, without having some prior discussion  
> to what it means. If I saw a suggested option in an editor, I would  
> generally assume that there is some agreement as to what it is  
> supposed to mean.

You can already add new shop values willy nilly with no discussion, and 
lots of people do (and value this capability and would be loathe to give 
it up).

I hope that when this happens in the future (a) the editor would already 
know what other people have used, so you'd be able to see immediately 
whether the first person to previously see a joke shop (say) labelled it 
shop=joke or shop=jokes and you can follow suit rather than inventing a 
similar tag (or if you are perverse or don't like the one they chose, 
you can introduce a new one and mark one of them a synonym of the other 
so a renderer can know about both without any recoding), or if none you 
can add your own, and (b) you are aware you are doing this and it is not 
just a spelling error.

The action to add a new tag/value ought still to be simple in an editor, 
so you're not held up for lack of anyone adding shop=joke previously, 
but it should at least ask you to describe what you mean so you can 
spread the word and at least minimally document your tag. (Of course, 
you could code an editor to bypass all of this, but that would be rather 
unhelpful to everyone else).

David