[OSM-talk] 3 months of OSM

Serge Wroclawski emacsen at gmail.com
Mon Apr 30 16:44:53 BST 2012


On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 7:43 AM, Douglas Musaazi
<douglasmusaazi at yahoo.com> wrote:
> The links for tagging, naming features, and the wiki are detailed enough and
> have most of the information that any user might be interested in, and i had
> a thought that some features could have more priority than others to map to
> OSM.

This is subjective, as I'll demonstrate below.

> For example Schools, Health centers, Roads, Landuse, businesses,
> housing, as the list continues, such that the wiki has features with the
> most priority that are common and relevant atleast in every country.

If you ask the various OSM contributors what features they are most
interested in, the list will vary greatly.

An extreme example of this is one young German contributor who maps
the electricity grid, noting the company, voltage, cycles, etc. of
each line. He doesn't seem to care much about roads, or schools, but
he's very interested in utility polls.

I don't care that much about schools- I'm not a student nor do I have
children. It's a low priority to me, but I am quite interested in
sidewalks. I like to know which streets are pedestrian friendly and
which aren't. And Landuse, I think is largely used improperly (a topic
for another thread).

OSM provides tagging guidelines via the wiki, and while some are more
globally accepted than others (and will be rendered and put in
editors) for the most part, tagging guidlines are descriptive rather
than prescriptive. If you go off and invent your own, it's less likely
to be used by others, but for the most part, what works in OSM is that
is in use, rather than some official guideline handed down from above.

Therefore we let users map what they feel is important to them, and
don't impose external priorities.

- Serge



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