[OSM-talk] Culvert and average contributor

M∡rtin Koppenhoefer dieterdreist at gmail.com
Fri Aug 27 11:03:42 BST 2010


2010/8/26 Pieren <pieren3 at gmail.com>:
> Question 2 : if not, is it normal that OSM average contributor has to use
> these technical words just to make the civil engineers happy ? Don't we take
> the risk to exclude more and more average contributors by adopting such
> technical vocabular ?


There is a good reason that specialists use specialist language: it is
precise. If you could express the same diversity with common language
terms there would be no need for special terms.

Therefore I welcome the use of precise terms. You will generally have
to look things up somewhere (given that this is not done by your
editor, in which case it doesn't matter what the tag is), so imho
there is no difference.

For the specific case of the culvert it might still be imprecise ;-),
as it doesn't differentiate between an "inverted siphon" [1] and a
"sewer pipe" [2].

I'm not sure if I used the exact English terms, to understand the
difference please look at the first images here:
[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BCker
[2] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durchlass

Of course this can also be an advantage and be solved by subtagging.

cheers,
Martin



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