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

Jochen Topf jochen at remote.org
Tue Jan 24 15:32:23 GMT 2012


On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 03:59:51PM +0100, Janko Mihelić wrote:
> 2012/1/24 Pieren <pieren3 at gmail.com>
> 
> >
> > I could add another one : "delete what is beyond understanding".
> > Because your principle is against another one : "verifiability".
> > Because your principle - if it is tolerated - might end up with
> > elements tagged with dozen references to external applications and the
> > readable tags will disappear in the number.
> >
> > Pieren
> >
> >
> Let us add another one: "Delete only after trying to contact the author for
> a period of time no shorter than xy".
> Community is the most important thing here. Someone in the community knows
> what those tags should mean. Find them and argue your points.

If the author made no effort to document their special tags and the tags look
non-sensical to me, I don't see why I have to spent the time finding those
people and argue with them. In most cases it will probably been an error or
some trial anyway and people will not care about those tags.

OSM is not a dumping ground for everybodies personal data. OSM is a community
effort so if you add unusual data you should discuss it beforehand with the
community and document it for the community.

I am not talking about somebody inventing a new kind of amenity=something tags.
Thats fine and people don't have to discuss this kind of thing to death before
using it. But if somebody wants to add lots of XZ:ID:BLUB=1235656 tags to the
database they should discuss that.

We trust users to decide what is useful for OSM and add and change anything
in OSM. We trust them to take proper care. We should also trust them to remove
things entirely that make no sense having. With the proper care, of course.

So I suggest the rules to be:
* If you care for your tags, you should document them. That way they will look
  useful to more people. It also allows the community to have a discussion based
  on facts to decide whether some data is useful for OSM.
* If you care for OSM you are encouraged to clean up the database whenever
  you encounter rubbish. We trust the users to differentiate rubbish from useful
  stuff and do the right thing.

The question what happens with document tags that are still rubbish is another
one, that I will not address here.

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf  jochen at remote.org  http://www.remote.org/jochen/  +49-721-388298




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