[OSM-talk] Semantics layer for tags

[Martijn van Exel]

Hi all,

There was a presentation about something like this at the last SOTM,
but I can't remember who did it. Please chime in.

I was talking to a friend just now about mobile editors for OSM and
soon enough the discussion shifted towards general usability issues
for OSM. A major one for me has always been the culture / language
dependency of the tags. Many of the longer threads on this list, and
also in real life talking about OSM, are about some form of 'how do I
attribute this?' A big part of why that question is so hard to answer
is in cultural and language differences. What constitutes a trunk road
in Lithuania? What is a chemist in Spain? Not all tags even translate
one to one. This will continue to be a challenge. As the range of
editors and contributors broadens, this challenge is going to be even
greater.

Ideally we would have a semantic layer between the user and the
database / API. This layer would comprise of an ontology of geographic
feature representations in different languages, think a structured
version of the different language versions of the Map Features page.
The ontology would also include synonyms of feature representations
(think chemist's vs pharmacy, motorway vs freeway vs highway). On top
of the ontology would be an interface allowing applications to present
the end user with features in their own language. This interface would
translate input in any language to a generalized classification for
insertion in the database.

A semantic layer would solve a lot of problems with tagging ambiguity,
break down language barriers, help create a cleaner database and
generally make OSM more accessible. It would not only be useful for
editing, but also for data representation on rendered maps as well as
navigation software.

Thoughts? Are we doing this already?

Martijn van Exel +++ m at rtijn.org
laziness – impatience – hubris
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