[OSM-talk] Tagging schema

[James Livingston]

On 06/10/2009, at 10:58 PM, David Earl wrote:
> 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).

Sure, and I uses that all the time. I was just trying to say that I  
think a lot of people (myself included) would tend to assume that  
suggestions being offered by an editor had at least some vaguely  
consistent meaning, which a lot of the shop tags don't.


> 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).

I think that being able to document your tag would be useful, even (or  
especially) when someone else has already done so. It would allow us  
to collect more data about how people are actually using the tags, and  
might help to find things that need to be ironed out.