[OSM-talk] Playing tagging democracy: standard building process and tag unifying towards it

[Claudius]

Am 02.02.2010 22:24, Jochen Plumeyer:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I am new to the OSM community, sorry if my suggestions are totally naïve.
>
> Fact: The collective end product is rendered somehow, and the renderer
> stylesheets decide, how to interprete tags.
>
> So it seems to me, that creating 2 things is necessary:
>
> 1.: We need a process of negotiation about tag rendering standards. (i.e.,
> between the people who write the Mapnik stylesheet and the others who want to
> see their tags rendered in a certain way).

Just a sidenote: Although it seems to be the showcase of OSM the mapnik 
rendering at www.openstreetmap.org is *NOT* what OSM is about. OSM is 
first of all a database and the mapnik rendering at OSM.org is just one 
tiny graphical representation of it's content. IMHO the current 
stylesheet is doing very well in being rather minimalistic when it comes 
to rendering stuff. There are dedicated renderers for other 
representations of the data in the database (Cyclemap, OSMC Reit- und 
Wanderkarte, OpenLinkMap, OpenSeaMap and so on).

Rather than trying to influence the work of the one guy doing Mapnik we 
should put more effort in getting this message out, especially to 
newcomers in our project. The best would be by removing the map from 
www.openstreetmap.org but rather put an introduction up there and then 
linking to viewing different renderings and the editing. If newcomers 
get the idea that they can tag (almost) everything and put it into the 
database, then the project's idea has won.

Claudius