[OSM-talk] no rendering of amenity=veterinary

[Steve Bennett]

On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 11:16 AM, Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping at googlemail.com>wrote:

> The first case is "just" garbage in the database - not nice but doesn't
> really hurt. But how do you know that it will "never" get rendered?
>

Obviously you'd only know retrospectively. But when I say that unrendered
tags are harmful, I mean situations where there are multiple ways of tagging
the same situation, and only some of them get rendered. The unsupported tags
are worse than junk, and worse than nothing, because mappers will be misled
into thinking that the thing has been tagged properly.

For example, in this case, imagine that lots of people are using amenity=vet
or service=veterinarian or something, which never gets supported. That's
wasted effort, and may prevent someone else tagging those vets properly.


> However, "tagging for the renderer" will make existing data less
> reliable: "is this really a beach or someone tagged their personal
> playground to appear in yellow?". Bad!
>
>
At least it renders. :)

I really do think it's time to address our processes here. The most
important thing, imho, is that different people who set out to tag the same
thing do it the same way. It doesn't matter all that much the tag is
amenity=veterinarian or amenity=vet, but if both are used, that's bad. So
the wiki should attempt to document and normalise usage of tags as soon as
they appear. And people should make every attempt to follow that
documentation. The relationship between tag usage, tag documentation, and
support in mapnik/osmarender is a bit less clear, but should be talked
about.

Steve
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