[OSM-talk] "proprietary" keys and values, machine readable vs. humans

Martin Koppenhoefer dieterdreist at gmail.com
Tue Jan 24 13:35:19 GMT 2012


2012/1/24 Jonathan Bennett <openstreetmap at jonno.cix.co.uk>:
> On 24/01/2012 11:22, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
>> I wonder if this kind of tagging should be tolerated. In the wiki I
>> found no documentation regarding this tag, and therefore this data
>> seems unusable for most mappers.
>
> Perhaps not, but systematically removing it won't improve anything
> (since most apps will just ignore the tags), and will actually increase
> the amount of storage needed (since a new version of the objects in
> question will be created).
>
> We have (or at least, should have) a simple principle in OSM: Ignore
> what you don't understand. That applies to mappers and to applications
> using the data. The alternative is edit wars where one mapper things a
> particular tag -- that otherwise does them no harm -- is "wrong" and
> starts removing them and their creator puts them back.


While I understand the idea behind (deletions also occupy space/need
computing power, at least if performed via the API), I still feel that
we should have a policy to request tags and values to be human
readable.

How would you improve / modify (say split) an object where you don't
understand part of the tags applied to it?

Imagine that this tendency grows stronger and a few imports later our
db would have more crypted keys then "readable" ones. If osm is about
open data, it should be really open, not only freely available but
unusable because crypted. Why should we use free and open ressources
to distribute free-but-not-open content?

cheers,
Martin



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