[OSM-talk] no rendering of amenity=veterinary

[Tobias Knerr]

Steve Bennett wrote:
> 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. 

I disagree. The most important thing is that different people using the
same tag use it for the same kind of thing.

Its a matter of seconds to replace all amenity=vet with
amenity=veterinary once you have noticed that there are two tags with
the same meaning. It would even be trivial to simply support both in a
renderer if cleaning up the database isn't an option for some reason.

However, if you find out that there are 627 contradicting
interpretations of "cycleway" and you cannot find out which use of the
tag follows which interpretation, fixing that mess is much harder.

> It doesn't matter all that much the tag is
> amenity=veterinarian or amenity=vet, but if both are used, that's bad.

That's an easy case, because there isn't really a "better" solution
here. Many tagging scheme alternatives are a bit more complicated,
though, such as addr:street tag vs. associatedStreet relation. In that
kind of situation, early normalisation might easily lead to mandating
the solution that would, after some experimentation, have turned out to
be the inferior choice.

Tobias Knerr