[OSM-talk] Tagging Seamarks

[Arne Johannessen]

Malcolm Herring wrote:
> Andreas Labres wrote:
>> 
>> Continuing dispute between the two groups
> 
> I was suggesting that a state of peaceful co-existence can be achieved - Our editors will not alter or remove tags that are not ours, and hopefully this will be reciprocated.

Not realistic IMHO. At least one of the editors currently in use (perhaps even several) is GUI-only and apparently operates only on one of those tagging schemes. As a direct result, nodes with tags like this have been observed on several occasions:

buoy:colour=red
seamark:buoy_whatever:colour=green

The thing is that this so-called "peaceful co-existence" leads to one group not reading the other group's tags when editing. This kind of error is prone to happen over and over again and creates sever inconsistency issues for any third party attempting to create a "neutral" renderer or editor.

I see agreeing on one single, official OSM tagging scheme as the only realistic long-term solution.


>> and become productive (get nice renderers, get nice editors etc.).
> 
> Nice renderers and editors do not just materialize - they have to be written by the members of the sub-projects.

True, it looks like the "peaceful co-existence" is a necessary situation for the time being. Ideally though, everyone would work towards discussing and creating a single scheme.


> This is the crux of the matter - after having spend considerable time developing those tools, based on a particular set of tag definitions, any later suggestion that we should change them is not going to receive an enthusiastic response!

Depends, I'd say. Perhaps the tools are written in a way that embraces such changes. I don't know, I didn't really look at the source of any of the editors.


> As far as users are concerned, editors remove the need to manually edit tags, thus no knowledge of the tagging scheme is necessary. As to the question of which scheme to use - choose the editor that will place your work onto the map overlay that you want to see it on.

In such a situation, the map overlays could just as well operate a database of their own, as there wouldn't be any point in having their data in OSM. Or am I mistaken?


> PS: there has been a recent update of the OpenSeaMap JOSM plugin ("toms"). This is now in the OSM repository, so it can be installed using the JOSM Preferences dialogue. The accompanying Mappaint styles will shortly be installable by this method also.

Sounds intriguing! I looked at it half a year ago, when it was still very much pre-alpha work. I'll be sure to check it out again, thanks for the heads-up.

Cheers,
Arne

-- 
Arne Johannessen