[OSM-talk] Fwd: Nav4All navigation shut down by Navteq

[Roland Olbricht]

Hi,

> You make this sound as if this is about the freedom of the new mappers.
> But they are, even today, free to follow any ruleset, cheatsheet, or
> book that they want to use. It's just that they don't get a guarantee
> that everyone else is using the same ruleset but that's ok - there might
> be rulesets much too complex for a newcomer, or the newcomer ruleset for
> rural Peru might be different from the one for urban Japan. Trying to
> make them all the same will needlessly reduce OSM's richness. These
> rulesets are unlikely to be devised by the same body; it would be too
> complex and the result would be less than optimal for everyone involved.

We could have support for local tagging guides in a future version of the 
database without much effort. See
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_v0.7#Classes

This would allow an editor to suggest tagging schemes with respect to the area 
where the mapping takes place. Mappers can explicitly tell what their tagging 
means. The advantage over hard-coded click-buttons is that it can be used 
across different editors. The advantage over the wiki is that it is maintained 
by those who really map. If different mappers want to use slightly and subtle 
different tagging schemes, they just can do without rants. But a simple 
postprocessing server can for any defined purpose still automatically derive a 
consistent tagging.

Thus we could have rules to check "minimum data quality" without forcing the 
would into a overly complex, ill-fitting tagging scheme.

Cheers,

Roland